Saint Who?
Saints Who Promoted Eucharistic Devotion
Saint Filippo Smaldone
Priest and founder († 1923) Feast: June 4
Filippo Smaldone was born in Naples in 1848. By age twelve, he had resolved to become a priest. During his seminary years he felt a consuming desire to minister to the deaf-mute community of Naples. There was little help for these people, and Filippo became so busy working with them that he just scraped by on his exams for minor orders. He was relocated for a time so he could focus on his studies. But once he was ordained he resumed his work.
The work was not easy. He met with so many difficulties that he considered abandoning his ministry for the foreign missions. But guided by his spiritual director, he came to find in the trials a sign that God was with him in his labors. With a fellow priest and some religious sisters, he established a new community of sisters to care for the deaf, mute, and blind: the Salesian Sisters of the Sacred Hearts.
He also founded the Eucharistic League of Priest Adorers and Woman Adorers. Filippo himself spent hours in Adoration. And his great love for the people he served expressed itself when he would repeat that one should kneel before a deaf person as before the Eucharist. He died at seventy-four from diabetes, and was canonized in 2006.
Compassionate Father, may we, like Saint Filippo,
grow in charity through Eucharistic Adoration.
