St. Luigi Orione

Who they were

Luigi Orione was a paver's son from Tortona and briefly a pupil at St. John Bosco's Oratory, and he founded the Sons of Divine Providence to prove his motto in the least metaphorical way available to him. Only charity will save the world, he said, and then went and did it with a shovel.

When the 1908 Messina earthquake killed tens of thousands he went immediately, pulled survivors and the dead out of the rubble with his own hands, and gathered orphans by the hundred, until the pope made the priest with the shovel his vicar for the disaster zone. He did it again at the Marsica quake in 1915. Between catastrophes he built the unglamorous permanent kind of charity, homes for disabled and abandoned people across Italy and Latin America, and he kept the friendship of the era's difficult and doubting men, who trusted him when they trusted no other collar in Italy. He died at Sanremo in 1940 and was canonized in 2004.

Why people turn to St. Luigi Orione

First responders, disaster relief workers, and everyone whose instinct is to run toward it, with St. Florian. Orphans, and the people who take them in. He also belongs on the Turin line with St. Joseph Cafasso, Bosco and St. Dominic Savio.

How to ask their intercession

When the news breaks, one decade for the responders, naming the place. Then his order of operations, which was the donation or the shift, because charity was never a feeling to him.