Saint Joseph Cafasso

Joseph Cafasso was born on January 15, 1811, at Castelnuovo d'Asti in Piedmont, the same village where Saint John Bosco was born four years later. Small and with a slightly twisted spine, he was ordained a priest in 1833 and joined the Convitto Ecclesiastico in Turin, a college for young priests, where he taught moral theology and later served as rector. Against the harsh rigorism of the time, he taught confessors the gentle approach of Saint Alphonsus Liguori.

Cafasso spent long hours in the confessional and in the city's prisons, and he accompanied some sixty condemned men to the scaffold, so that people called him the priest of the gallows. He was a mentor and generous supporter of Don Bosco, helping him begin his work with poor boys. He died in Turin on June 23, 1860, and Pope Pius XII canonized him in 1947.

In 1948 Pope Pius XII named him patron of Italian prisons and prisoners, and prison chaplains take him as their model. His body rests in the Shrine of the Consolata in Turin.

The Salesian family, Don Bosco's spiritual children, honor him as a father of their work.