BIFFI, EUGENIO

BIFFI, EUGENIO. — Of the Institute of the Foreign Missions of Milan, bishop of Cartagena (Colombia). Born in Milan on 22 December 1829, he was a seminarian in 1848 and took an active part in the Cinque Giornate. In 1853 he entered the Institute of the Foreign Missions and was sent (1856), at the request of Pius IX, to the diocese of Cartagena in America, which was in a serious state of material and, above all, moral decline. Catechism and vocational schools, missions to the people, visits to prisoners, and care for the sick caused Christian life to flourish there anew. Following the political disturbances that broke out in the republic, B. was exiled in 1862 for having defended the rights of the bishop. He took refuge in Jamaica and then in Yucatán, where he evangelized the Maya Indians; in 1866 he acted as an intermediary for peace between them and the English governor. That same year he was recalled to Milan, from where he departed on 9 December 1867 as apostolic prefect of the new mission of eastern Burma. He visited the vast mission several times, founded schools and charitable institutions, built churches and residences, introduced photography, electroplating, the cultivation of coffee, mulberry trees, and cinchona, and established the first lithography and printing works. In 1882, at the unanimous request of the Colombian people, clergy, and authorities, he was elected bishop of Cartagena. The diocese, where Freemasonry and immorality prevailed and which had been left without clergy, was a “dead man to be raised,” as the archbishop of Bogotá put II. B. set to work as he had in 1856. Despite the continual political disturbances, he reopened the seminary and many abandoned churches, founded colleges and charitable institutions, multiplied pastoral visits, defended the freedom of the Church, and brought religious men and nuns into the diocese, reviving ecclesiastical discipline. For his apostolate in Burma and Colombia he was called the “apostle of two continents.” He died at Barranquilla on 8 November 1896.