**SEMERIA, GIOVANNI** – Orator and writer of the Barnabite Order, born at Coldiradi (Imperia) on 26 September 1867, died at Sparanise (Caserta) on 15 March 1931. At the age of fifteen he entered the novitiate of the Barnabites at Monza. In Rome, after completing his philosophical and theological studies at Sant’Apollinare and the Ateneo of Propaganda Fide, he was ordained priest on 5 April 1890. In 1892, he obtained a degree in letters at the University of Rome; then, in 1897, a degree in philosophy at Turin. His earliest apostolic labors were among the pupils of the oratory of the Sacred Heart directed by Fr. Baravelli, and later among the workers, boys, and poor of the Verano district.
Meanwhile, he frequented the Sunday literary circle of Giulio Salvadori and began publishing historical essays and works of theology and biblical criticism; with Fr. Savi he also initiated a series of brilliant lectures in the hall of San Carlo ai Catinari. In 1892, at the behest of Leo XIII, he took part in the Catholic Congress of Social Studies held in Genoa. In September 1895 he was sent from Rome to Genoa as vice-rector and professor at the “Vittorino da Feltre” Institute, of which he became the guiding spirit for seventeen years. From 1904 he also directed the young people’s circle of St Alexander Sauli, where in November 1897, together with Fr. Ghignoni, he had founded the Higher School of Religion for the study and dissemination of Christian history and thought. At the same time, in the church of Le Vigne, he delivered regular Sunday homilies which, for eleven years, extended throughout cultured Genoa from Advent to Lent, when he would depart for Lenten preaching in the principal cities of Italy.
During these years he took an active part in the lively movement of religious and moral ideas centered on Christian Democracy, with that sincere love of truth, clarity of exposition, and inexhaustible originality of thought which drew young people to him. His natural goodness and his “indulgent optimism toward men, events, and things” (Filippo Meda) led him to approach men of different confessions and to interest himself in ideas and study “errors which,” as he would later affirm in the well-known letter to Fr. Gemelli (*Epilogue of a Controversy*, 1919), “I do not believe I ever intended to profess, but toward which I may have inclined, slipping into them in days of facile enthusiasm, through a transposition of mildness from the erring to the errors, to the danger and harm of some overly trusting and insufficiently cautious reader.” Accused of modernism, in April 1912 his superiors sent him to Brussels, where he was warmly received by Cardinal Mercier. Today, the orthodox intentions of Fr. Semeria are evident both from the body of his work and his entire life, and from his explicit profession of faith. In 1913 he made a journey to Greece and the Holy Land. Then, on 10 July 1914, two days before the German invasion of Belgium, he crossed into Switzerland, to the Bonomelli Mission in Geneva, where he resumed preaching in Italian and began a weekly series of Dante readings for Italian workers.
In the summer of 1915 General Cadorna called him to Udine as chaplain to the Supreme Command—indeed, to the entire army. Untiring in the trenches, hospitals, concentration camps, and rear areas, he became very popular among officers and soldiers, until Christmas night 1918, when in the cathedral of Trieste he intoned the *Te Deum* of peace. Immediately afterward, together with Don Giovanni Minozzi, he founded the National Opera for the Italian South (*Opera naz. del Mezzo-giorno d’Italia*) for the war orphans of southern Italy. On 15 and 8 March 1931 he delivered his final lectures in Genoa and Montecassino. On 15 March death overtook him among his little orphans at Sparanise (Caserta).
Today the National Opera for the Italian South, entrusted to Don Giovanni Minozzi and the Pia Società dei Discepoli, comprises 25 orphanages, 76 asylums and workshops, 5 mountain and seaside colonies, a home for the elderly, and 2 teacher-training schools for women.
At the School of Religion and in the church of Le Vigne in Genoa, Fr. Semeria wrote the books with which he placed himself at the forefront of the scientific-religious renewal in Italy: *Venticinque anni di storia del cristianesimo nascente* (Rome 1900); *Il primo sangue cristiano* (ibid. 1901); *Dogma, gerarchia e culto nella Chiesa primitiva* (ibid. 1902); *Scienza e Fede e il loro pretesto conflitto* (ibid. 1903); *Gli inni della Chiesa* (ibid. 1903), reprinted in 1926 under the title *Poesia divina*; *L’eredità del secolo* (ibid. 1900); *Il pensiero di S. Paolo nella lettera ai Romani* (ibid. 1903); *Le vie della Fede: Contributi apologetici* (ibid. 1903); *La Messa nella sua storia e nei suoi simboli* (ibid. 1903), as well as many pamphlets, lectures, panegyrics, commemorations, and articles in scholarly journals and various daily newspapers.
After the war, although his activity was almost entirely devoted to charitable works, to countless lectures and speeches on behalf of his orphans, and to editing his monthly journal *Mater Divinae Providentiae: Mater orphanorum*, he did not neglect his autobiographical volumes: *Memorie di guerra* (1924) and *Nuove memorie di guerra* (1928), *I miei ricordi oratori* (1927) and *I miei tempi* (1927), *I miei quattro Papi* (Leo XIII, Pius X, Pius XI, Benedict XV) in two small volumes (1930) and a third posthumous volume on Benedict XV.
Under the auspices of the National Opera for the Italian South there have been published in small volumes the *Vangeli delle Domeniche*, *Le Epistole delle Domeniche*, *Le Beatitudini*, *La Famiglia*, and other minor works; while the Confrères have issued the *Pater noster*, *Maria ideale di virtù*, *La morale e le morali*, *La Messa* (3rd ed.). Manuscripts remain of the apologetics courses given at the School of Religion from 1903 to 1912 and of almost all his sermons, including the famous Lenten series at San Lorenzo in Damaso (1897).
In the history of the Church in Italy, Fr. Semeria remains less as an original thinker than as a most fertile and lucid animator and disseminator of Christian thought and history, a captivating and brilliant lecturer and orator, and above all an apostle of charity.
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Virginio M. Colciago