PRIESTLY FRIENDSHIP. - Secret society for the formation of the young clergy. In documents it is indicated by the abbreviation A. S. It was founded in Turin by Fr. Niccolò von Diesbach and by the members of the Amicizia Cristiana, around 1782, with the aim of gathering together, in secret, select groups of clerics in sacris who lived outside the seminary and of priests, particularly young ones, in order to train them for the preaching of missions and spiritual exercises according to the method of St. Ignatius and to initiate them into the apostolate of the good press.
The Amico Sacerdote - for so the members were called - had to work intensely: 1) for his own sanctification: daily meditation, spiritual reading and examination of conscience, annual spiritual exercises; 2) for his intellectual formation through the thorough and methodical study of dogmatic and moral theology and in general of all the ecclesiastical disciplines. He had, moreover, to prepare a complete course of preaching for missions and for spiritual exercises according to the Ignatian method, and to keep himself informed of the news by means of the Gazettes «in order to accustom - declares the servant of God Pius Brunone Lanteri - the ecclesiastic not to restrict his ideas and his interest to his own country alone, but to regard the whole world as his homeland, all men as his brothers... so as to be able thus easily to enter into conversation with seculars and then speak to them of God after the example of the saints».
The A. S., besides Turin, was also active in Florence and seemingly also in Milan; there was an attempt to introduce it into Savoy, Switzerland and the Rhenish Palatinate. It disappeared after 1804. The principal apostles of the A. S. were Diesbach and Lanteri.
Bibliography
A. Pietro Frutaz