PRIESTLY FRIENDSHIP. - A secret society for the formation of young clergy. In documents it is indicated by the initials A. S. It was founded in Turin by Fr. Niccolò von Diessbach and members of the Christian Friendship around 1782, with the aim of secretly gathering select groups of clerics in sacris who lived outside the seminary and of priests, particularly young ones, to train them in preaching missions and spiritual exercises according to the method of St. Ignatius and to initiate them into the apostolate of good press.
The "Priestly Friend" — as the members were called — had to work intensively: 1) on his own sanctification: daily meditation, spiritual reading, and examination of conscience, annual spiritual exercises; 2) on his intellectual formation through thorough and methodical study of dogmatic and moral theology and, in general, of all ecclesiastical disciplines. He also had to prepare a complete course of preaching for missions and spiritual exercises according to the Ignatian method, and keep himself informed through gazettes «to accustom — declares the Servant of God Pio Brunone Lanteri — the excluded to not restrict his ideas and concerns to his own country alone, but to regard the whole world as his homeland, all men as his brothers... so that he may thus easily engage with laypeople to speak to them of God, following the example of the saints.»
The A. S. flourished not only in Turin but also in Florence and seems to have existed in Milan as well; efforts were made to introduce it in Savoy, Switzerland, and the Rhenish Palatinate. It disappeared after 1804. The principal apostles of the A. S. were Diessbach and Lanteri.
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