FAGNANO, JOSÉ

Salesian missionary in Argentina and Chile; b. Rochetta, Italy, March 9, 1844; d. Santiago de Chile, Sept. 18, 1916. As a youth he entered the seminary but soon left to enlist as a soldier in Garibaldi's army, then fighting for Italian unification. Disappointed in the military life, he returned to his classical studies. After becoming a friend of Don Juan bosco, founder of the Salesians, he reentered the seminary; he was ordained on Sept. 11, 1868. He received the degree of doctor in fine arts in Turin, and in 1875 went to America with the first Salesian expedition to Argentina. A year later he was director of the first Salesian school in America, established in San Nicolás de los Arroyos, Buenos Aires. Persuaded by Don Bosco, he went to Patagonia in 1880 and started his evangelistic work. He enlisted in General Villega's army, while it was fighting the natives, toward whose pacification and conversion he worked. He was a parish priest in Patagonia in 1860 and in the course of his apostolic work built two schools, the first hospital, and a metereological observatory; he also established a school and a church in Viedma. In 1883 the Holy See named him apostolic delegate to southern Patagonia. He played an important role in the pacification of the natives and built a school and an oratory in Punta Arenas, Tierra del Fuego. He accompanied Ramón Lista's expedition of 1886 and inspected the lake that today bears his name; he carried livestock to Willes Bay and on horseback explored Dawson's Island, supporting in his correspondence the Argentine's right to rule the Falkland Islands. Fagnano died loved and understood by the natives.

Bibliography: r. a. entraigas, Monseñor Fagnano (Buenos Aires 1945).

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