CHAPTER I

BEGINNINGS

“QUAM DILECTA TABERNACULA TUA DOMINE VIRTUTUM.”

PAUL JEROME CASANOVA WAS BORN at Port-Maurice, then forming part of the Republic of Genoa, on the 20th of December, 1676, and was baptized the following day in the collegiate church of St. Maurice. His father was in what we should speak of nowadays as the Genoese Merchant Service, and was captain of his ship. Paul was an only child, and two years after his birth his mother died. Dominic Casanova shortly afterwards married again, and had four children, three boys and a girl. The girl subsequently became a Dominican nun in the Convent of St. Catherine of Sienna at Taggia, and two of the boys, following their step-brother’ s example, became Franciscans. The third remained in the world.

Till he was thirteen years old Paul Jerome Casanova remained at Port-Maurice. He was of the number of those who, like St. Bernard, seem from their earliest childhood to have been gifted with an extraordinary appreciation of divine things. The house of God was where he felt most at home; a pilgrimage to some outlying church of Our Lady was for him a relaxation and recreation more appreciated than games. However, he had no wish to draw aside from his play-fellows; it was as yet no passionate longing for solitude that rendered the rollicking joys of a healthy child’s life distasteful to him, but simply a great desire for the presence of God, and for his companions to share with him in the delights of that presence. He did not, as so many child saints have done, retire to some secret place to pray, but rather rejoiced in being allowed to join with his parents in saying the family prayers out loud.

Life at Port-Maurice for Paul Jerome must have been a very simple affair. He attended the parish school, and was a familiar figure in the parish church: he used to go for long walks with his friends, wandering over that lovely coastline, and say his Rosary with the rest night by night before bed. He had, however, what so many have wished to have and dreamed about, a real rich uncle, Augustin Casanova, who lived at Rome. Doubtless his brother Dominic had seen to it that Augustin should know of his promising young nephew and of what “parochus” and schoolmaster thought of him, insinuating at the same time that his own modest means could go no further than Port-Maurice and its parish school. The best happened; and Paul Jerome was soon making his way to Rome, at his uncle’s invitation. He was just thirteen years of age.

On his nephew’s arrival, Augustin Casanova went straight to work. He first chose the boy a confessor in the person of Fr. Grifonelli, an Oratorian, and then arranged for him to attend a private school kept by a learned priest.

After three years with his tutor, during which Paul Jerome seems to have more than fulfilled the high expectations of his uncle—already somewhat disappointed, it would seem, in his two sons—it was arranged for him to attend the courses of study given by the Jesuits at the Gregorian. After two years at Humanities and Rhetoric, he passed on to Philosophy, always living with his uncle, to whom he endeared himself more and more.

Whilst at Rome Paul Jerome naturally made new friends; not many, it appears, as already the call to solitude and retirement was beginning to make itself felt, but still a few, and those genuine. Such a one was the tradesman Louis Foggia, to whom the Saint often referred in later life as one to whom he owed much, to whom he owed in particular the great grace—invaluable to him as he advanced in life—of so walking constantly in the presence of God as never to become ruffled or put out by the failings of others. Such a one, again, was the student Peter Miré, who later became also a priest. In holiday-time Peter and Paul would walk out from the Gregorian to Augustin Casanova’s house in the Via Salaria, reciting the Rosary together as a prelude to their recreation.

But Paul Jerome, pious young man though he was, was not of the demure and gilt-edged prayer-book type. He was not afraid of the rough and tumble of apostolic ways. When only seventeen he was admitted as a member of the Oratory of Fr. Caravita, the Jesuit, and was soon advanced to the ranks of those whose duty it was, in mission time, to round up backsliders in the various districts of Rome—an arduous work, exposing the young apostles to many rebuffs, rude remarks, and ridicule. For such, however, he fortified himself by prayer and spiritual reading, to which he devoted a considerable time, and by practices of mortification which, even at so early an age, he managed to mingle with the amenities of his comfortable home in the Via Salaria. Already we see in miniature the future Saint, attending to the souls of others, yet not neglecting his own, cajoling the lax to attend missions and assiduously reading St. Francis de Sales; retailing fragments of Saints lives and Jesuit sermons instead of eating his supper, and sleeping on the floor of his bedroom instead of in his bed.

Then, after a general confession made to Fr. Grifonelli in the room once hallowed by the presence of St. Philip himself, there comes a climax. Paul Jerome realizes his vocation to become a religious, but, unlike what usually happens nowadays, whilst quite certain of his vocation, he was wholly at a loss to decide which Order to apply to.

Walking one day in Rome, he came across two religious whose aspect struck and edified him, precisely because of the absence of any pose assumed to strike and edify. Their habit was aggressively poor, no mere make-believe of poverty—their attitude one of real humility, not the feigned air as of condescending kings; and yet princes they were for all that, collocet eos Dominus cum principibus, and living with princes: two Franciscans living—as Paul Jerome discovered, for he followed them—in the Convent of St. Bonaventure on the Palatine. The two friars reach the convent and enter; Paul Jerome slips into the church. Converte nos Deus salutaris noster: such is the greeting he receives, for the friars are chanting Compline. Profoundly moved, stirred as he had never been before by book or sermon, by learned lectors or saintly directors, struck to the quick by the psalmody within and by the undying vision—for they now seemed to him as angels—of the two friars he had seen outside, Paul Jerome finds the peace and rest he had long sought for; no doubts now—Hæc requies mea—here must his life lie.

Quickly he returns and relates all to Fr. Grifonelli. The Oratorian has long known the Convent of St. Bonaventure and those whose home it is, and the manner of their life there. He, too, has no doubts now, after the young man’s story and, more still, the manner of its telling. Paul Jerome hears from the lips of St. Philip’s son the assurance that it is God’s Will he should enter the Convent of St. Bonaventure and become a Franciscan. A Jesuit and a Dominican, consulted at the suggestion of his confessor, both give the same advice. En avant then, surely, for what obstacle was there now? God’s Will made evident, what more could man wish for?

Strangely enough, however, for the new-born enthusiasm of Paul—naturally enough as we look at it now—Augustin Casanova, in his pleasant house on the Via Salaria, was far from seeing eye to eye with his young nephew. God’s Will, so abundantly evident to Paul Jerome, aglow with the spirit of sacrifice, appeared to his uncle in a very different light. Had not much time and labour and money been spent on his education? Had he not already commenced those studies in medicine which were to secure him ultimately a profession and social standing far above anything Port-Maurice could have offered him? Had not his father sent him to Rome precisely for this purpose, and had not he, Augustin Casanova, received him into his household precisely on this understanding? How, then, could he have the face to turn round now, and—regardless of all the tender care so lovingly bestowed upon him—propose to bury himself and his talents in a convent of mendicant friars?

Paul Jerome—with the sublime disregard of logic shown by others before and since who find themselves circumstanced as he—could but assent to all his uncle’s arguments and yet persist in ignoring them in practice. Augustin Casanova, however, was no man to trifle with. He had received Paul Jerome whole-heartedly and done his very best for him. A similar whole-heartedness must now mark his disapproval. It did: and Paul Jerome very shortly found himself homeless in Rome. In this extremity he sought and obtained shelter with a distant relative of his, a certain Leonard Ponzetti, who received him kindly, and under whose roof Paul awaited his father’s opinion on the great step he was proposing to take.

For Dominic Casanova the religious life was not a mere churlish fleeing from the world, such as it appeared to his brother Augustin, but much rather a living to God, and it was in the realization of this great truth that he took up the letters he had received from brother and son, and went out into the church of Port-Maurice. Here, kneeling before the high altar, he offered up to God the sacrifice of the son he so dearly loved. Then he went home and wrote off the letter giving his consent.

Paul Jerome, however, was not one easily to forget all he owed to his uncle, and the old man’s unbending opposition to his Franciscan vocation caused...