Lino Maupas

Who they were

Born Alpinolo Ildebrando Umberto Maupas at Split, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Kingdom of Dalmatia, on 30 August 1866, the youngest of ten children of an aristocratic family of French descent, he was drawn to Saint Francis by a book his uncle, a bishop, gave him for his Confirmation. He entered the Franciscan convent at Kosljun but, after his first vows, was dismissed as unsuited to religious life owing to poor health and an unstable temperament; readmitted through an old professor who alone had understood him, he made a second novitiate at Fucecchio in Tuscany, taking the name Lino, and was ordained priest in 1890. Sent to Parma in 1893, he remained there the rest of his life, becoming known as Father Lino da Parma.

Nearly blind from a childhood eye illness, he was called "the friar of the dead" for burying Parma's poorest people, going into the city's most disreputable and dangerous quarters, which even the police avoided, not to beg but to bring bread, sweets and medicine gathered from the charity of the rich; his convent had to lock away its pantry and wardrobe against his constant "raids" on behalf of the poor, and shopkeepers let him take goods he could never pay for because he gave everything away at once. As prison chaplain he lived in a cell like the other inmates, working to improve their conditions and find them work, even bringing a newborn baby into the prison so its imprisoned father could see it. He died of a heart attack on 14 May 1924 inside the Barilla pasta factory, where he had gone looking for work for one of the many unemployed men he helped; his body was carried into the prison for a last farewell from the inmates, who built his coffin themselves, while all Parma stopped to mourn him.

The miracles

The Church has not yet approved a miracle in this cause.

Why that counted as sanctity

Franciscan friar known in Parma as 'the friar of the dead' for his tireless charity to the destitute and to prisoners in the city's poorest quarters.