SALERIO, CARLO. - Missionary and founder of the Sisters of Reparation, b. in Milan on 22 March 1827, d. there on 29 Sept. 1870. As a cleric he took part in the barricades of 1848, then enlisted in the volunteer battalion of the Lombard students (in the company of the seminarians), operating at Mantua and Custoza.
Having returned to the Seminary and been ordained a priest, he was among the first students of the nascent Institute of Foreign Missions (1850) and set out with the first expedition (1852) for Melanesia and Micronesia, where he worked for three years, repeatedly exposing his life and permanently compromising his health. To the apostolate he joined the study of his field of work, so that the results of his geographical-ethnological-religious research were published by the Mittheilungen of Gotha (1862) and his collections formed the first missionary Museum of the Seminary of the missions and enriched those of the Civic Museum of Milan.
A professor of English at his Seminary, he was also a tireless apostle, confessor, lecturer and preacher, combining broad vision with the strictest practice and spiritual direction. In 1857-59 he gave life to a new institution, then called the Institute of the Pious Ladies of Nazareth, dedicated to the education of endangered or imperiled minor girls, later joining the new cenacle to the similar one founded in Venice by the ven. Anna Marovich. A young man of irrepressible vivacity and yet of the firmest resolve, he died at not even 43 years of age and left a large quantity of unpublished writings of sacred oratory and spiritual direction.
Bibliography2 works
Giovanni B. Tragella