St. Anthony Mary Zaccaria

Saint Anthony Mary Zaccaria was born in 1502 in Cremona, a city in the Duchy of Milan in northern Italy. He was orphaned of his father, Antonio, at a young age and was raised primarily by his mother, Antonietta Pescaroli, who entrusted his early education to the religious of the convent of San Barnaba. Cremona in the early sixteenth century was a sophisticated urban center shaped by the remnants of late medieval piety and the rising influence of Renaissance humanism, and it was within this cultural environment that Zaccaria received his first formation in letters and the classical disciplines.

He went on to study humanities and philosophy, first at Cremona and later in Padua, but the common claim that he earned a medical doctorate and practiced as a physician does not appear in the reliable early sources on his life. What the sources do attest is that by his early twenties he had turned away from the worldly ambitions of a young man of his class and was drawn to a life of prayer and service to the Church. He was ordained a priest around 1528, somewhat later than the canonical minimum age, and returned to Cremona to begin his ministry at a time when the diocese was in need of reform.

Zaccaria quickly became associated with a circle of priests and laypeople in Milan committed to a renewal of Christian life, including the preaching of the regular canons Lateran Antonio Maria Besozzi and the humanist Bartolomeo Ferrari. On November 26, 1530, the feast of St. Sylvester, he and these companions founded a new community at Milan: the Clerics Regular of St. Paul, soon popularly known as the Barnabites because their first church was dedicated to Saint Barnabas. The order's purpose was the reform of clergy and laity through preaching, the administration of the sacraments, and the Christian education of youth. A parallel lay confraternity, the Angelic Sisters of St. Paul (often called the Angeliche), was established under the spiritual direction of the Barnabites, with prominent members including the Countess of Guastalla, Ludovica Torelli.

He is remembered for an energetic preaching style that combined solemnity with a striking use of penance, sometimes accompanied by the ringing of bells in the streets to gather crowds. He is also credited with popular devotions such as the ringing of church bells at noon on Friday to commemorate the Passion, and with encouraging Eucharistic adoration and the veneration of the Blessed Virgin. After returning to Cremona in 1539, worn out by his apostolic labors, he died there on July 5, 1539, at the age of thirty-six, and his remains were later translated to the church of San Barnaba in Milan, the mother church of the Barnabite order.

He was beatified by Pope Pius VII in 1816 and canonized by Pope Leo XIII in 1897. The Barnabites he founded went on to establish schools and missions across Europe and beyond, and his call for a renewed clergy and a laity formed in the Christian life contributed in its own way to the wider reform currents that culminated in the Council of Trent, which was still gathering its force during his brief years of ministry. He is today regarded as a pioneer of Catholic reform in the decades immediately before the Council.