FERDINANDO BONACINA. — Missionary, died for the faith. Born in Reggio Emilia on 7 April 1804, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1826 as a lay brother. Highly skilled in various trades, he rendered great service at Tivoli and Rome, to the point of persuading Gregory XVI to accept his plan for restoring the Acqua Paola aqueduct. In 1840 he disembarked in Syria, where he earned an almost legendary reputation for his strength, goodness and skill, to the point of being proposed by the natives to succeed the Maronite patriarch m. in 1853. He served the mission especially by building houses and churches (churches of Bikfaya and Zalhe, the Ghazir seminary, the first college in Beirut, etc.). During the massacres of 1860, he was killed by the Druses on 18 June together with his superior Fr Billot at Zalhe in Lebanon and buried in the church he had built. The process for his beatification has been opened along with that of the other martyrs of Lebanon.
BONACINA, FERDINANDO
Bibl.: P. M. Martin, Notes historiques sur cinq Jésuites massacrés au Mont-Liban en 1860, in A. Carayon, Documents inédits concernant la Compagnie de Jésus, XVIII, Poitiers 1865; L. Rocci, I sei martiri del Libano della Compagnia di Gesù uccisi nel 1860, Isola del Liri 1927, pp. 101-17. Edmondo Lamalle