MENGONI, TEOFILO (TEOFILO DA SOCI). - Franciscan preacher and writer of the Order of Friars Minor, born at Soci (Arezzo) on 12 July 1864, died at Fiesole on 31 May 1949. He entered the Order in 1880 and was ordained priest in 1888.
In Rome he served as private secretary to the Servant of God Fr. Bernardino da Portogruaro and to Fr. Agostino da Montefeltro during their preaching at S. Carlo al Corso. He educated Franciscan youth at Figline Valdarno (Florence), at Fiesole and at Sargiano (Arezzo). His principal work was the founding of the Antonine sanctuary at Montepaolo (Dovadola, province of Forlì), where St. Anthony of Padua had lived as a hermit and which has since become a place of pilgrimage.
* MENNI, BENEDETTO. - Restorer of the Hospitaller Brothers of St John of God (v.) in Spain and founder of the Hospitaller Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and of the Blessed Virgin Mary (v.), born at Milan on 11 March 1841, died at Dinan (France) on 24 April 1914.
He took his vows on 10 May 1860 and made his solemn profession on 17 May 1864, and was ordained priest on 14 October 1866. The Prior General, Giuseppe Maria Alfieri, entrusted him with the task of reviving the Spanish branch of the Order, which had been suppressed by the anti-clerical laws of 1835-36. With a special mandate from Pius IX dated 25 April 1867, and lacking both means and knowledge of the language, he reached Barcelona, where in the same year, with the help of the bishop and several benefactors, he opened a modest asylum for poor, rachitic and scrofulous children. There he gathered some fellow brothers from Italy, France and Spain, and with them began the Spanish revival of the Order. He suffered greatly both from his own brethren and from the revolutionaries of 1868 and especially 1869, who did not refrain from shooting at him. He took temporary refuge in France, but returned the following year to northern Spain, bloodied by civil war, as a delegate of the Red Cross. Once internal order was restored, in 1876 he founded at Ciempozuelos, near Madrid, the psychiatric hospital which became the driving force behind the restored Spanish branch, which later extended to Portugal (1893) and even to Mexico (1901). At the establishment of the Spanish province in 1884, he was chosen as its first provincial. Realising the need for a female congregation to care for the sick in the hospitals he was erecting, in 1880, with the collaboration of Maria delle Angustie Giménez and Giuseppe Reciò, he founded the Hospitaller Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Called to Rome, he subsequently served as Apostolic Visitor (1909) and Prior General of the Order (21 April 1911), resigning this office on 19 June 1912 for reasons of health. His constant ideal was to love and serve God by alleviating the sufferings of his neighbour. A man of great strength of character and indefatigable worker, he left a wide reputation for a holy life, so that the processes for his beatification are already deposited in the Sacred Congregation of Rites.