GHELLINI, Gellio, Venerable. - B. Jan. 23, 1559 at Vicenza, d. there Aug. 29, 1616. Of a noble family, at the age of 15 he was sent to the University of Padua for the study of philosophy and theology. Inclined to the religious life, he made a vow to enter the Society of Jesus. When his father resisted his intention and serious health problems arose, he obtained from the Holy See a dispensation from the vow and set out toward the priesthood in the secular life. A confrere of the Oratory of St. Jerome and numbered at the age of 21 among the canons of the Cathedral, he was ordained a priest on Sept. 24, 1583.
In the exercise of his apostolic charity he turned particularly to women given over to prostitution, going so far, in order to snatch them from the underworld, as to pay large sums to the "unworthy and greedy wolves" who exploited them, gathering them afterward into a house, "Il soccorso," founded and financed by him, until he should be permitted to settle them suitably either in the religious life or in marriage. In 1598 he obtained from the University of Ferrara the degree of doctor in theology. He thought that the degree, like the renunciation of his canonry made in 1600, would make him more fit to found a congregation of secular priests that he had devised. In Rome, where he had gone to set about carrying out his plan, he met Calasanzio, and, drawn more by his own zeal than by the invitations of the founder of the Piarists, he devoted himself with all his soul, in Rome and in Naples, to the apostolic works of that Congregation, so that he abandoned the idea he had cherished. In 1607, yielding to the insistent pressure of his relatives, who had tried in vain to make him accept the bishopric of Parenzo, and of the bishop of Vicenza, he returned to his native city. Having refused the canonry again offered to him, he received the office of confessor to the nuns of S. Maria Nova. Appointed parish priest of Sts. Faustino and Giovita in Vicenza in 1615, he died the following year worn out by his labors and, perhaps, infected while caring for plague-stricken soldiers passing through the city. His body was buried in the church of S. Faustino.
The acts of the process of beatification are preserved in the archive of the Episcopal Curia, posiz. 1-0578.