Spinelli, Francesco

SPINELLI, FRANCESCO. - Priest, founder of the Adoratrices of the Most Blessed Sacrament, b. in Milan on 14 April 1853, d. at Rivolta d'Adda (diocese of Cremona) on 6 February 1911.

As soon as he was ordained a priest at Bergamo (1875), on a journey to Rome, while he was praying in St. Mary Major, he felt a strong interior impulse to found a Congregation of sisters who would adore the Most Blessed Sacrament in reparation for the insults to which it was subjected. Having returned to Bergamo, while preaching at S. Gervasio d'Adda, he met the servant of God Caterina Comensoli, who was already contemplating the same design, and in 1882 he founded the Congregation of the Adoratrices, which, however, had to join to adoration also the works of the apostolate.

After the first excellent successes, the considerable debts, contracted without any moral fault of his own, for the founding of other houses, obliged him in 1889 to separate himself from the Institute and to leave the diocese. Welcomed affectionately by the bishop of Cremona, he was sent as spiritual director to the house he had founded at Rivolta d'Adda, where in 1895 he established a new Congregation of Adoratrices, entirely separate from that of Bergamo, but preserving the purpose, the Rules and the habit of the first foundation. The sorrows and contradictions endured by the S. attracted upon the new Institute the blessings of heaven with the ever-growing creation of other houses. The cause of beatification of the S. was introduced in Rome on 25 January 1952.

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