RECROSIO, RAIMONDO (FILIPPO). — Barnabite, bishop, born at Vercelli on 1 October 1657, died at Bolena (Nice) on 21 May 1732.
He taught philosophy and then theology at the Collegio Chappuy in Annecy (1680–99); assigned to Thonon for the missions in Chablais, for 14 years he preached missions and Lenten sermons tirelessly and gave spiritual exercises to clergy and people. Superior at Vercelli from 1716, he founded in that city and elsewhere houses for retreats. Elected bishop of Nice in 1727, he visited the entire diocese, which had been deserted for 20 years
because of disputes between the Savoyard king and the Holy See; he held the Synod and built the Seminary. He is buried in the church of S. Cristoforo at Vercelli. His beatification process was initiated in the curias of Vercelli and Nice.
The fruits of his 35 years of missions and retreats in Savoy are the Sentimens de componction (Lyons 1709), reprinted several times in French and Italian; Instructions chrétiennes à l'usage des missions des clercs rég. de St. Paul (Annecy 1712), in dialogue form; and 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 (manuscript in the Roman Archives of S. Carlo), is very important because the author gathers in one volume “everything that is currently practiced in spiritual exercises,” which “are by now the devotion of the public”; it also contains an unusual Meditation on the wound in Jesus’ side (published by Fr. Manzini in I Barnabiti, 14 [1935], integral section, 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 metho-
do disposita, 2 vols. (Milan 1719 and 1722), a summa of dogmatic and moral theology, in which the construction of everything upon Love is fervently mystical: from assisting love in the treatise De Gratia, to the disorder of love in De peccatis, to love variously healing in De Sacramentis, and onward to love ordering all other loves in De Charitate, to the De uno et trium Amoris obiecto in De Triunate, to the De primis dilectoribus Dei in De Angelis, to the De Magistro et piguere Amoris in De Verbo incarnato, to the De Amore reideate unicuique suum in De Justitia, and finally to the “Reward of Divine Love” in De beatitudine.