SULPRIZIO, NUNZIO, venerable. - B. at Pesco Sansonesco (diocese of Sulmona) on 13 Apr. 1817, d. at Naples on 5 March 1836.
Left an orphan at an early age, he was taken into the home of an uncle, a blacksmith (1826), of a rough and demanding character, who burdened him with work and ill-treatment until he was reduced to a pitiable state. Learning of this, another uncle, a soldier, had him brought down to Naples and entrusted him to his colonel, Felice Wochinger, who, moved by the sight of that poor skeletal boy, able to support himself only on crutches, had him admitted to the Hospital of the Incurables of S. Maria del Popolo (1832); and later took him into his own home, where he soon died of gangrene.
Even amid so much ill-treatment he preserved an unalterable piety and peace; and in the hospital and in Wochinger’s home he exercised a remarkable apostolate by example and above all by counsel and exhortations to the service and love of the Lord. His cause of beatification was introduced on 9 July 1859.