MAZZA, NICOLA. – Founder of pious institutions in Verona, born there on 10 March 1790 and died on 2 August 1865. From the first years of his priesthood (1814), he manifested his particular vocation as the “father of the poor.” The two girls whom he took in, in poor quarters, in 1828 were the seed of the Institute in which he provided numerous abandoned girls with a family education, enabling them to live as though in their own home, ingeniously divided into “families,” each with a “mother.”
In 1832 he began an institution for poor boys endowed with intelligence and sound judgment, giving them the opportunity to complete their studies free of charge, including university and advanced studies, until they attained the profession corresponding to their aptitudes.
He awakened and fostered the missionary vocation in several pupils who became priests and his co-workers, and with them he attempted to establish a mission in central Africa, under the direction of Giovanni Beltrame. To assist them, he had groups of black boys and girls brought specially from Africa and educated in sections attached to his institutions in Verona. After a first heroic attempt had failed, he was about to begin a second with greater hopes of success when death overtook him. His institutions in Verona for abandoned girls and poor students (with a university college in Padua), directed by the group of priests whom M. himself had placed over them, continue to flourish; the group has recently been organized as a secular institute. M.’s missionary work was later revived and brought to prosperity by his disciple Daniele Comboni in the Institute for African Missions of Verona. The ordinary processes for his beatification have been conducted.