Danio Mozzi, M.I.

Cesare Bresciani was born in San Pietro di Legnano in 1763. He studied at the College of the Acolytes and in 1801 entered the Sacred Brotherhood which had been founded by Leonardi. A lover of literature and poetry, he taught rhetoric at the College of Acolytes and was ordained a priest in 1806.

After years of intense and brilliant teaching and literary activity, in 1828 he became a fixed part of the spiritual direction of the shelter for the sick and the hospital, where he remained until his death.

In 1836, at the emergency hospital of Verona, he looked after those who had been struck by cholera and he became passionately interested in the life of St. Camillus de Lellis. He brought together a group of priests and laymen to provide corporal and spiritual service to sick people and entered the Camillian novitiate of Casale Monferrato. When making his religious vows he took the name of Camillo Cesare. In 1842 the generalate curia of Rome and the Austrian government gave him permission to open the first Camillian community in Verona. Many of his religious risked their lives during the waves of cholera and petechial fever and cared for wounded or dying soldiers during the three wars of independence.

In San Martino and Soflerino, Henry Dunant, inspired by the Camillians, with their red crosses on their chests, and moved by a grave health-care emergency, established the bases for the future Red Cross. Father Bresciani died in Verona on 20 July 1871.

   Bresciani developed relationships with the great founders of the nineteenth century, with bishops and with civil authorities. In poetry and prose, he wrote funeral orations for famous figures, eulogies for princes and bishops, and panegyrics for saints and blesseds.

The charism yesterday and today…

St. Camillus, tempered by the experience of suffering, following the example and the teaching of the merciful Christ, was called by God to assist the sick and to teach others how to serve them. The Church has acknowledged in St. Camillus and his Order the charism of mercy towards the sick in imitation of the Good Samaritan, defining the work of the Founder as a new ‘school of charity’. St. Camillus saw the sick as his ‘lords and masters’ and beheld in them the person of Christ; often he gave food to them on his knees, asking them for forgiveness for his sins. The Camillians profess a fourth vow to serve the sick even at the risk to their own lives; a red cross is their distinctive sign.

Thanks to his reading of the sources, Fr. Bresciani managed to understand anew the Camillian charism which had been forgotten in its totality because only spiritual assistance provided by priests in the homes of the dying was developed. He considered the original role of the lay brother in corporal service to the sick in hospitals as something that could not be abandoned. Father Bresciani is seen as the second founder of the Order because he brought it back to the spirit of its origins.