VENUTA, LUIGI. – Priest, born in Nicosia on 3 January 1823, died in New Jersey (U.S.A.) in 1872.
Attached to the Palermo parish of S. Rocco, in January 1848 he was among the first ecclesiastics to join the anti-Bourbon insurrection and took an active part in the conflicts of those days, exhorting and encouraging the combatants on the barricades. Elected deputy for his native constituency to the Sicilian Parliament, he was later sent to Nicosia, where he succeeded in energetically restoring public order. He asked, however, not to be diverted from his priestly ministry by political duties and wished to follow, as a military chaplain, the few Sicilian troops sent to the battlefields of Lombardy. The Bourbon restoration in the island also struck the V., who was arrested twice: released from prison and placed under special surveillance in December 1849, after his second detention he was given the choice between confinement and exile (March 1850).
He preferred exile and went to the United States, where he spent the remainder of his brief life, carrying out an admirable apostolate among European immigrants, especially Italians, for whom he founded and directed numerous charitable institutions. The spread of Catholicism in North America owes much to him, because of the self-sacrifice with which he placed himself at the disposal of the local bishops in New York, Brooklyn, Newark, and finally in New Jersey. Completely absorbed in this new field of work, he declined to return to Sicily in 1860, despite the appeals addressed to him; he limited himself to a brief journey in 1871, a few months before his death.
Renzo U. Montini