BERNARDINO DE' BUSTIS. - Great Franciscan preacher, b. in Milan, of the noble de' B. family, ca. 1450. He did his early studies in Milan, and those of jurisprudence at Pavia, obtaining his degree there; he was received among the Observant Friars Minor ca. 1475. To his contemporaries he appeared as another St. Bernardino. He died in the reputation of sanctity between 1513 and 1515, and probably on 8 May 1513, in the convent of S. Maria della Misericordia at Melegnano. He is called "blessed" by popular acclaim.
De' B. excels as an apostle and writer, particularly on Marian subjects. Besides some ascetical opuscules (Expos. super Orationem dominicam, and Traet. de Imitatione Christi per assumptionem status Tertii Ordinis de Poenitentia (Italian trans., Naples 1621)), he published the celebrated Defensorium Montis Pietatis against bitter opponents of the institution (Milan 1497), later completed by the opuscule Consilium de retrovendendo et de pacto retrovendendi. His most voluminous oratorical work is the Rosarium Sermonum per Quadragesimam, a handbook for preachers and Latin outlines of the sermons delivered, as always, in the vernacular by B. (Strasbourg 1496; revised and definitive edition, Venice 1498). The Officium et Missa glorios. Nominis Iesu (Milan 1492) was approved by Sixtus
IV. On the Blessed Virgin he published 9 sermons De Immac. Conceptione (later part 1 of the Mariale), Opusculum (1482), Elucidarium (1492), and Off. et Missa de Immac. Concept. (1492; approved by Sixtus IV in 1480), finally the major and most widely circulated work, the Mariale de singulis festiv. B.V.M., composed in 1492 (1st ed. Nuremberg 1493; 7th ed. Ul., Cologne 1607), in 12 parts and 63 sermons that illustrate the whole life of the Blessed Virgin. Particularly important is the doctrine on the Immaculate Conception and on the universal mediation, in its two phases, admitted in a strict and formal sense.
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