GALLIZIA, PIO ALESSANDRO. — Barnabite missionary, bishop of Selisma and second apostolic vicar of the Mission of Ava and Pegu in Burma, born at Varallo in 1701, died in Pegu in March 1745.
He was teaching dogmatic theology in Rome when, in 1726, he departed for Pegu, arriving at Syriam on 21 January 1728, but was unable to proceed to Ava, where Fr. Calchi, the first apostolic vicar, died two months later. Obliged to sustain the mission alone, in 1737 he returned to Italy to seek assistance. Having obtained from Benedict XIV in 1740 that the entire mission should once again be entrusted to the Barnabites (whereas, after Fr. Calchi’s death, the kingdom of Ava had been entrusted to secular priests, leaving Martaban and Pegu to the Barnabites), and having been consecrated bishop by the hands of the same Pontiff, in February 1741 he set out again with four other confrères: Fr. Nerini with his brother Angelo Capello, and Fathers Alessandro Mondelli, lecturer in theology at Milan, and Giovanni del Conte, not yet a priest; they landed at Syriam between 1742 and 1743. Having been granted broad freedom by the Pegu king Siming-To, the bishop and the latter two settled in the ancient royal city of Pegu, building there a church and a house, and undertaking to preach and to exercise their ministry publicly as well. But during the war between the Burmans of Ava and the Peguans, who had proclaimed themselves independent, they were caught up in an ambush laid by the suspicious Pegu king for a company of European adventurers who had suddenly appeared in the port of Syriam. While Nerini and his brother Capello at Syriam managed to save themselves for the time being by fleeing, Bishop G., together with Fathers Del Conte and Mondelli, who were accompanying the Europeans, were murdered by the Peguans in the forests between Pegu and Syriam in March 1745.
One of his works, Compendio della dottrina cristiana e ragioni per abbracciarla, like the Libro di preghiere quotidiana, a Catechismo, and a Dizionario barmano by his two confrères, has been lost.
Another Fr. PIO ALESSANDRO GALLIZIA (1735–63), likewise a Barnabite from Varallo and nephew of the preceding, was an extremely active missionary in the same mission of Ava from 1760, together with Fr. Sebastiano Donati; but he died there soon afterward, in 1763, at Monlà, shortly after his companion.