PRIESTLY FRIENDSHIP. — Secret society for the formation of the young clergy. In the documents it is designated by the initials A. S. It was founded in Turin by Fr Niccolò von Diesbach and the members of the Christian Friendship, around 1782, with the aim of secretly gathering selected groups of clerics in sacris who lived outside the seminary, and of priests, especially young ones, in order to train them in preaching missions and spiritual exercises according to the method of St Ignatius, and to initiate them into the apostolate of the good press.
The Priest Friend — as the members were called — was to work intensively: 1) for his own sanctification: daily meditation, spiritual reading, and examination of conscience, and annual spiritual exercises; 2) for his intellectual formation through the thorough and methodical study of dogmatic and moral theology and, in general, of all ecclesiastical disciplines. He was also to prepare a complete course of preaching for missions and spiritual exercises according to the Ignatian method, and to keep abreast of current affairs through the Gazette, “in order,” declares the servant of God Pio Brunone Lanteri, “to accustom the ecclesiastic not to restrict his ideas and his interests to his own country alone, but to regard the whole world as his fatherland, all men as his brothers... so that he might thus easily approach laypeople and then speak to them of God, following the example of the saints.”
The A. S., besides Turin, also existed in Florence and apparently in Milan; attempts were made 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.
A. Pietro Frutaz