BIFFI, EUGENIO. - Of the Institute of Foreign Missions of Milan, bishop of Cartagena (Colombia). Born in Milan on 22 Dec. 1829, as a seminarian in 1848 he took an active part in the Five Days. In 1853 he entered the Institute of Foreign Missions and was sent (1856), following a request by Pius IX, to the diocese of Cartagena in America, which found itself in a grave state of material and above all moral decay. The schools of catechism and of work, the missions to the people, the visits to prisoners, the care of the sick, made Christian life flourish there again. Following the political turmoil that broke out in the republic, B., in 1862, was exiled 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 was a peace intermediary between them and the English governor. In that same year he was recalled to Milan, whence he set out on 9 Dec. 1867 as apostolic prefect of the new mission of eastern Burma. He visited the vast mission several times, founded schools and charitable works, built churches and residences, introduced the art of photography, electroplating, the cultivation of coffee, mulberry and cinchona, and set up the first lithography and printing press. In 1882, by unanimous request of the people, the clergy and the Colombian authorities, he was elected bishop of Cartagena. The diocese, where Freemasonry and immorality reigned, left without clergy, was a "dead man to be raised," as the archbishop of Bogotá put it. B. set to work as in 1856. Despite continual political turmoil, he reopened the seminary and many abandoned churches, founded colleges and charitable works, multiplied pastoral visits, defended the freedom of the Church, called religious and nuns into the diocese, reviving ecclesiastical discipline. For his apostolate in Burma and in Colombia he was called "apostle of two continents." He died in Barranquilla on 8 Nov. 1896.
Bibliography
Raffaele Trotta