From “the Green Heart of Italy” to the World

Today we mark the feast day of St. Gaspar del Bufalo, who founded in the Missionaries of the Precious Blood in 1815 in Giano, a village in what is now Italy. 

St. Gaspar was born in Rome in 1786. He was 22 when he was ordained, and 29 when he founded our Congregation. Reversing the trend of a lot of young people, he went out from the city into the countryside to begin his true, central mission of preaching about the power of the Precious Blood of Jesus, a message that we still believe and spread today, over 200 years later. 

Giano, and its abbey of San Felice, which St. Gaspar used as a base of operations while he and his Missionaries went forth to preach parish missions and renew the Church, is in what is now Italy’s region of Umbria. Umbria is called “the green heart of Italy,” for its bucolic landscapes, scenic waterways and gentle hills. God’s bounty grows in Umbria, where farmers tend to olive groves that have been in place for generations. 

Olive trees, experts at adapting to their environment, live an average of 300 to 600 years. So it is completely conceivable that the olive trees of Umbria would have been witnesses to Gaspar’s early ministry. They would have “seen” him on his missionary road. 

God has layered all life on this planet. Even among humans, who like to think that we can catalogue each generation, lives interlap and are interwoven in time and space in ways that we cannot always comprehend. We remember Gaspar though we never met him. He inspires us though he has long since gone to his heavenly reward. We carry the package that he prepared for us, a love of and devotion to the Precious Blood of Jesus, as if St. Gaspar himself put it into our hands. And we in turn find new ways to deliver that message. Our roots and branches, as with the olive tree, stretch toward places where we have never been, sharing this Good News with people we do not yet know.