St. Joseph Cafasso

Who they were

Joseph Cafasso was a small, slightly deformed Piedmontese priest who spent his career at the Convitto in Turin training young clergy in moral theology, in the merciful school of St. Alphonsus Liguori and against the era's harshness, and his off hours in Turin's prisons.

Over his life he accompanied more than sixty condemned men from cell to scaffold: hearing their confessions, staying through the night, standing beside them at the drop. He called them, in complete earnestness, his santi impiccati, his hanged saints, holding that a man who dies repentant and absolved dies well, whatever the state does with his body. Among his students was a raw country seminarian named John Bosco. Cafasso became his spiritual director, his funder, and the quiet architect of the Oratory, which makes him the man behind Bosco and behind Dominic Savio too. He died at forty nine, and Bosco preached the funeral.

Why people turn to St. Joseph Cafasso

Prison chaplains and death row ministry, with St. Dismas. Families with someone incarcerated. And everyone whose work is accompanying the dying, for whom he is the professional's patron of the deathbed.

How to ask their intercession

For a prisoner by name, and for the chaplains. At a deathbed his method was presence plus the assurance of absolution, and Dismas's one sentence finishes it.