GHELLINI, GELIO, Venerable. — Born on 23 January 1559 in Vicenza, died there on 29 August 1616. Of noble family, at the age of 15 he was sent to the University of Padua to study philosophy and theology. Inclined to the religious life, he made a vow to enter the Society of Jesus. When his father opposed this intention and he was beset by serious health problems, he obtained from the Holy See a dispensation from his vow and proceeded to the priesthood in the secular life. A confrere of the Oratory of St Jerome and, at the age of 21, numbered among the canons of the Cathedral, he was ordained priest on 24 September 1583.
In the exercise of his apostolic charity, he turned particularly to women engaged in prostitution, going so far as to pay large sums to the “unworthy and greedy wolves” who exploited them, in order to rescue them from a life of vice. He then gathered them into a house, “Il Soccorso,” which he founded and financed, until he could arrange for them to be suitably placed either in religious life or in marriage. In 1598 he was awarded a doctorate in theology by the University of Ferrara. He believed that the degree, like his renunciation of his canonry in 1600, would make him more suitable for founding a congregation of secular priests, which he had conceived. In Rome, where he had gone to advance the implementation of his project, he met Calasanzio, and, drawn more by his own zeal than by the invitations of the founder of the Piarists, he devoted himself wholeheartedly, in Rome and Naples, to the apostolic works of that Congregation, so that he abandoned the idea he had cherished. In 1607, under pressure from his family, who had vainly tried to persuade him to accept the bishopric of Parenzo, and from the bishop of Vicenza, he returned to his native city. Refusing the canonry again offered to him, he was entrusted with the office of confessor to the nuns of Santa Maria Nova. Despite the parish priest of the SS. Faustino e Giovita in Vicenza in 1615, he died the following year, worn out by his labors and perhaps infected while assisting plague-stricken soldiers passing through the city. His body was buried in the church of San Faustino.
The acts of the beatification process are preserved in the archive of the episcopal curia, position 1-0578.