SALERIO, CARLO. - Missionary and founder of the Sisters of Reparation, born in Milan on 22 March 1827, died there on 29 Sept. 1870. As a cleric he took part in the barricades of 1848, then enlisted in the volunteer battalion of Lombard students (in the company of seminarians), serving at Mantua and Custoza.
Having returned to the Seminary and been ordained priest, he was among the first pupils of the nascent Institute for Foreign Missions (1850) and left with the first expedition (1852) for Melanesia and Micronesia, where he worked for three years, repeatedly exposing his life to danger and permanently impairing his health. Alongside his apostolate he pursued the study of his field of work, so that the results of his geographical, ethnological, and religious researches were published in the Mittheilungen of Gotha (1862), while his collections formed the first missionary museum of the Seminary of Missions and enriched those of the Civic Museum of Milan.
A professor of English at his Seminary, he was also an indefatigable apostle, confessor, lecturer, and preacher, combining breadth of vision with the strictest spiritual practice and direction. In 1857-59 he gave life to a new institution, then called the Institute of the Pious Ladies of Nazareth, devoted to the education of minors at risk or already fallen, subsequently joining the new community to the similar one founded in Venice by the venerable Anna Marovich. A young man of irrepressible vivacity yet most steadfast purpose, he died not yet forty-three years old and left a considerable body of unpublished writings on sacred eloquence and spiritual direction.