PARZANESE, PIETRO PAOLO. - Canon, preacher and poet, born at Ariano di Puglia on 11 Nov. 1809, died at Napoli on 29 Aug. 1852. After a troubled adolescence, he became a priest in 1831; in 1834 he obtained the chair of theology at the Seminary of Ariano; in the
Having entered the Oblates at Lachine in 1871 and been ordained a priest (1874), he immediately worked as a curate among the lumbermen of the immense forests of Canada. In 1874 he was sent as a missionary among the Indians of the Mackenzie and, from 1881, among those of the Athabaska. He was appointed apostolic vicar of Saskatchewan in 1891, where the first large groups of settlers were beginning to arrive. Mons. P. organized missionary activity among whites and Indians so effectively that the Holy See established the ordinary hierarchy and, by decree of 3 Dec. 1907, erected the diocese of Prince Albert, of which he was the first ordinary.