MENNI FIGINI, BENEDETTO, ST.

Baptized Angelo Ercolino (Angel Hercules) Menni, priest of the Hospitallers of Saint John of God and founder of the Hospitaller Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus; b. Milan, Italy, March 11, 1841; d. Dinan, northern France, April 24, 1914.

As one of the fifteen children of Luigi Menni and Luisa Figini, Angelo learned charity at home. He gave up his job as a bank clerk to serve the soldiers wounded in the Battle of Magenta. He joined the Brothers of St. John of God (1860) and was ordained priest in Rome (1866). In 1867, he was sent to Spain to revitalize the order following its suppression by anticlerical laws. Despite threats to his life and temporary expulsion, he founded a children's hospital in Barcelona (1867). His work over the next thirty-six years with the elderly, abandoned children, polio victims, and the mentally ill attracted many others with vocations, allowing him to open and staff twenty-two hospitals in Spain, Portugal, and Mexico, thus restoring the Hospitallers' work in Latin America.

In 1880, Menni founded the Hospitaller Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Ciempozuelos (near Madrid, Spain) with María Josefa Recio and María Angustias Gimenez, who established a psychiatric hospital in Granada (1881). The female branch of the Hospitallers spread throughout Europe and to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Menni later served as apostolic visitor (1909–11) and prior general (1911) before resigning due to ill health in 1912. His body rests in the motherhouse chapel of the Hospitaller Sisters in Madrid.

Menni was both beatified (June 23, 1985) and canonized (Nov. 21, 1999) by Pope John Paul II. In 2001 Menni was proposed as the universal patron of volunteers because he "discovered his vocation precisely when he was engaged in volunteer work in Milan" (John Paul II, canonization homily).

Feast: April 24.

Bibliography: Acta Apostolicae Sedis 78 (1986): 710–713. L'Osservatore Romano, English edition, no. 29 (1985): 6–7. m. soroldoni, Santità alla sbarra: la vita contestata di Benedetto Menni (Rome 1981). e. zuÑeda salazar, Benito Menni, testigo de la caridad (Madrid 1985).

[k. i. rabenstein]