RECROSIO, RAIMONDO (FILIPPO). - Barnabite, bishop, b. at Vercelli on 1 Oct. 1657, d. at Bolena (Nice) on 21 May 1732.
He taught philosophy and then theology at the Chappuy College in Annecy (1680-99); assigned to Thonon for the missions in the Chablais, for 14 years he tirelessly preached missions, Lenten courses, and spiritual exercises to the clergy and the people. Superior at Vercelli from 1716, he founded in that city and outside it houses for closed retreats. Elected bishop of Nice in 1727, he visited the whole diocese, which had been deserted for 20 years because of the disputes of the Savoyard king with the Holy See, held the Synod, and built the Seminary. He is buried in the church of St. Christopher in Vercelli. His process of beatification was begun in the curias of Vercelli and Nice.
The fruit of his 35 years of missions and exercises in Savoy are the Sentimens de componction (Lyons 1709), reprinted several times in French and in Italian: Instructions chrétiennes à l'usage des missions des clercs rég. de St. Paul (Annecy 1712), in dialogue form: Retraite spirituelle de dix jours sur les principaux devoirs des chrétiens (Avignon 1713). Another course in Italian: Esercizi spirituali fondati sulla suavità della misericordia e il rigore della giustizia di Dio (ms. in the Roman Archive of S. Carlo) is very important because the A. gathers in one volume "all that is at present practiced in spiritual exercises," which "are by now the devotion of the public"; there one also reads a singular Meditazione sulla lanciata al costato di Gesù (published by Fr. Manzini, in I Barnabiti, 14 [1935], parte integr., pp. 1-6), which places R. among the first apostles of the new devotion to the Sacred Heart.
R.'s major work is the Ordo Amoris seu teologia ethico-theorica ex maximo et primo dilectionis mandato nova methodo disposita, 2 vols. (Milan 1719 and 1722), a summa of dogmatic and moral theology, where the construction of the whole upon Love is fervently mystical; from the love that aids in the treatise De Gratia, to the disorder of love in the De peccatis, to the love that heals in various ways in the De Sacramentis and so on up to the love that orders all other loves in the De Charitate, to the De uno et trium Amoris obiecto in the De Trinitate, to the De primis dilectoribus Dei in the De Angelis, to the De Magistro et pignore Amoris in the De Verbo incarnato, to the De Amore reddente unicuique suum in the De Justitia, and finally to the "Reward of Divine Love" in the De beatitudine.
Bibliography2 works
Virginio M. Colciago