Joseph Pignatelli

The work of Joseph Pignatelli is intertwined with the destiny of the Society of Jesus during the darkest period of its history. Expelled from Spain in April 1767, he reached Italy with his companions. In 1773, Pope Clement XIV suppressed the order throughout the Church via the brief Dominus ac Redemptor: the Jesuits were henceforth forbidden from exercising their ministry. A refugee in Bologna, Pignatelli devoted himself to study and gathered books and documents on the history of the Society, while remaining a rallying point for his confreres dispersed throughout Europe. The Society then subsisted only in the Russian Empire, where Catherine II had refused to promulgate the papal brief. Relying on this survival and on successive papal authorizations, Pignatelli worked for the gradual reconstitution of the order. With the consent of Pius VI, he was able to welcome novices at Colorno, in the Duchy of Parma, where he was master of novices, before becoming provincial superior. He fostered the re-establishment of the Society in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the opening of houses in Naples and Rome, despite the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. He died in 1811, three years before Pius VII universally restored the Society through the bull Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum, on August 7, 1814.

The holiness of Joseph Pignatelli was forged in trial and perseverance rather than in brilliant works. Confronted with the dissolution of the order to which he had dedicated his life, he refused discouragement and revolt, choosing obedience to the Holy See even when it was the pontifical authority that, under pressure from European courts, had suppressed the Company. This fidelity to the Church, joined to a tenacious hope in the rebirth of the order, gives the measure of his interior life. Renouncing the advantages that his birth assured him, he voluntarily shared the poverty and uncertainty of exile. Testimonies present him as a man of prayer, gentle and patient, attentive to the humblest, faithful to the Ignatian spirituality of discernment and availability to the will of God. His reputation for holiness, already vivid during his lifetime because of his devotion to the poor and the condemned, was strengthened after his death. The process for his beatification opened in the first half of the 19th century and concluded after a long investigation. Pope Pius XI saw in him an actor in the rebirth of the Company of an importance comparable, for this second beginning, to that of Saint Ignatius for its foundation.

The canonization process for Joseph Pignatelli followed a long path after his death in Rome in 1811. Pope Pius XI beatified him on May 21, 1933, recognizing the heroic nature of his virtues and the decisive role he played in the survival of the Society of Jesus. His canonization was celebrated by Pope Pius XII in Saint Peter's Square on June 12, 1954. On that day, he was raised to the honors of the altar alongside four other blessed individuals proclaimed saints: Peter Chanel, Gaspar del Bufalo, Dominic Savio, and Maria Crocifissa Di Rosa. The Roman Martyrology and the calendar of the Society of Jesus set his liturgical memorial on November 15, the anniversary of his death. The official recognition of the Church thus consecrated the man whom Jesuit tradition considers the "second founder" of the order, whose discreet action had allowed for bridging the gap between the old Society, suppressed in 1773, and the Society restored in 1814.

The legacy of Joseph Pignatelli is above all that of a fidelity that ensured the continuity of the Society of Jesus through the ordeal of its suppression. Jesuit tradition considers him the "restorer" or the "second founder" of the order, an expression of the conviction that, without his patient obstinacy, the link between the old and the new Society could have been broken. His figure is honored in Ignatian spirituality as a model of perseverance in vocation amidst institutional crises and persecutions, and he is readily proposed as an intercessor for those who go through uncertainty and the trial of fidelity. Jesuits maintain his memory in their houses and colleges, and several educational institutions bear his name. His remains were transferred and rest in Rome, in the Church of the Gesù, the mother church of the Society of Jesus, where his tomb is the object of the veneration of the faithful. His life, entirely devoted to serving the Church in self-effacement, continues to inspire those who see in him a witness of hope maintained against all appearances.