GENOCCHI, GIOVANNI. - Missionary of the Sacred Heart, b. at Ravenna on 30 July 1860, d. at Rome on 6 Jan. 1926.
In the new movement of religious studies in Italy, he made Holy Scripture the center of his intellectual activity; and, greatly aided by his command of the Oriental languages - Greek, Hebrew, Arabic -, by his experience of the Holy Places, by his knowledge of the major languages of Europe, and by his contacts with scholars of every country, he was in this field an authority universally recognized and eagerly consulted.
He exercised a moderating influence within modernism and, although denounced to Pius X as almost conniving with the rebels, he found in the Pope defense and protection; and he had with him a correspondence that is a testimony to his faith, to his evangelical uprightness, and to his devotion to the Church. His learning was always placed at the service of the apostolate, and this opened wide for him the field of the priestly ministry, exercised first at Ravenna, in whose Seminary he was, at a very young age, spiritual director and teacher of Holy Scripture; then for a longer time in Syria and at Constantinople, where, by the will of Leo XIII, he was attached to those apostolic delegations, expending there an intense missionary activity; and finally for thirty years at Rome. Fr. G. was a missionary in the strictest sense of the word for a three-year period in the deadly regions of New Guinea, and after the First World War among the natives of the Putumayo, having received from Pius X the task of reporting on the brutalities inflicted by white masters on the Indian blacks.
He closed his missionary career with the apostolic visitation in Ukraine, where he was sent by Benedict XV and then by Pius XI to report on a broad movement for the union of the "Orthodox" with Rome, as it was taking shape in the countries of Russia restored by the war to Poland and in the regions bordering on Russia itself. Death prevented Benedict XV from creating him cardinal.
Bibliography2 works
Vincenzo Ceresi