Saint Alexander Sauli (1534/1535-1592)

The Congregation of the Clerks Regular of Saint Paul, known as the Barnabites, was born in Milan in the 1530s under the impulse of Saint Anthony Mary Zaccaria, together with Saint Angela Merici and Count Girolamo Miani. It set itself the task of preaching, catechesis, care of the sick and the reform of the clergy.^[15][16]

Alexander Sauli entered in 1551, at the age of seventeen. He was ordained priest in 1556. The accounts agree on the traits that distinguished him then: intense interior life, doctrinal rigour, aptitude for spiritual direction, and a preaching that spoke to the simple without yielding anything on substance.^[17][18]

In 1567, he was elected Superior General of the Congregation. This was the time when Saint Charles Borromeo undertook the great reform of the archdiocese of Milan, after the Council of Trent. Charles made his confession to Alexander Sauli and consulted him: the Barnabite became one of his most trusted counsellors.^[19][20] The meeting of these two saints illuminates a whole period of the Church in Lombardy: a cardinal archbishop who reforms, a religious who guides him in prayer and discernment.

On 10 February 1570, Pope Saint Pius V appointed Alexander Sauli bishop of Aleria, in Corsica.^[21][22] The diocese was then in a state historians describe as critical: wars and Barbary raids, a tried population, a poorly trained clergy, ruined churches, deep-rooted abuses. The future saint refused the charge at first, out of awareness of his own inadequacy; he yielded to obedience and set out.^[23][24]

The twenty-one years of his Corsican episcopate (1570-1591) make up the substance of his work. Nominis gives the exact formula: "twenty-one years of intense pastoral activity".^[25] It included:

• the systematic visitation of the diocese, despite the distances, the dangerous roads and the poverty of the places;
• preaching and catechesis to the people, in a language and with an order that all could receive;
• the reform of morals among clergy and faithful, announced with firmness and lived first by the bishop himself;
• the foundation of the seminary of Bastia, to train a clergy able to uphold doctrine and worship;
• the drawing up of a "model catechism", which remains one of the most lasting instruments of his passage;
• care for the poor, the sick and captives, on an island exposed to raids.

The beatification brief of Benedict XIV condenses the result in two propositions, which Nominis quotes as they stand:

"Morals were reformed, the clergy restored to its first fervour" (beatification brief, 1741).^[26][27]

For Corsica, the legacy is so deep that local tradition calls him "the Apostle of Corsica".^[28][29]

Two places in Corsica keep a particular trace of his episcopate. Bastia houses the seminary he founded: a house of formation, with a discipline and a programme of doctrine that served as a reference. The catechism he established there is called "model", that is, ordered, complete, suited to a people who had long gone without solid instruction.^[30][31]

Cervione long kept the memory of his episcopal presence. Nominis notes that his feast is still a "local feast" there in the cathedral.^[32] Corsican tradition has preserved the memory of a bishop who preached, catechized, visited villages and raised up churches; contemporary accounts and later notices agree on the intensity of this labour.^[33][34]

In 1591, Alexander Sauli was transferred to the diocese of Pavia. He stayed there only a year. The same method applied: reform of the clergy, preaching, doctrinal demands. In 1592, during a pastoral visit, he fell ill at Calosso d'Asti and died there on 11 October.^[35][36]

The reputation of sanctity did not die with him. The Cause was pursued in the eighteenth century; Pope Benedict XIV signed the beatification brief on 23 April 1741 (some accounts give 1742). The text of the brief, preserved in the notices, is an overall judgement on his episcopate: "Morals were reformed, the clergy restored to its first fervour".^[37][38]

Canonization was pronounced by Pope Saint Pius X on 11 December 1904.^[39][40][41] The date of 11 October remained that of his feast, the day of his death, with a particular solemnity at Cervione and among the Barnabites.^[42][43][44]

The title of "Apostle of Corsica" is not a figure of politeness: it names a precise work, an island raised up by twenty-one years of preaching, of foundation and of presence. The Church has seen in him a model of the missionary bishop within Christendom itself, a bishop who takes to the road again, refounds seminaries, begins catechesis afresh.^[45][46]

Representations of Saint Alexander Sauli are few but characteristic. Lombard painting of the late sixteenth or the seventeenth century shows him in ecstasy, at prayer, eyes raised, sometimes with the crozier and episcopal insignia; another scene shows him accepting the cross, an allusion to the obedience that led him to Corsica and to the mortification of his own will.^[47]

Episcopal portraits present him with the crozier, the mitre, sometimes a book (the catechism) or a model church (his diocese). Barnabite images gladly show him at the side of Saint Charles Borromeo, recalling their bond of spiritual direction, or of Saint Anthony Mary Zaccaria, founder of the Congregation.^[48][49]

For the faithful, the iconography of Saint Alexander Sauli says two things: a bishop at prayer (the ecstasy), and a bishop who obeys (the cross accepted). The rest of his life is read in his works: the seminary of Bastia, the catechism, the roads of Corsica.

• Saint Charles Borromeo: Archbishop of Milan, penitent and friend of Alexander Sauli, one of the great reformers of the post-Tridentine age.
• Saint Francis Borgia: Jesuit, contemporary companion of the Catholic Reformation and of the foundation of new orders.
• Saint Teresa of Avila: contemporary of Sauli (1515-1582), reformer of the Carmelites, Doctor of the Church.
• Saint John XXIII: pope whose feast falls on 11 October like Alexander Sauli, witness of a Church that forms its priests and proclaims the Gospel.
• Saint Philip the Deacon: one of the Seven of Jerusalem, another figure kept on 11 October.
• Saint Mary Magdalene: model of conversion, whose mercy Alexander Sauli preached in his popular missions.