Following the canonisation of seven new saints on Sunday 19 October 2025, Pope Leo XIV received pilgrims in the Paul VI Hall who had come for the canonisation of the martyrs Pietro To Rot, Bishop Ignatius Choukrallah Maloyan, the religious sisters Maria Troncatti, Vincenza Maria Poloni and Carmen Rendiles Martínez, and lay people Bartolo Longo and José Gregorio Hernández Cisneros, drew from each of them a message that is valid for our times, especially in the face of social injustice. “The men and women who have been proclaimed saints are shining signs of hope for all of us, because they offered their lives in the love of Christ and their brothers and sisters”.
Among the new saints we also find the man who has been called ‘the apostle of the Rosary’, Bartolo Longo, whose conversion from a man far from God to a life of works of mercy and sustained by love for Mary is recalled by the Pope.
Bartolo Longo was affiliated to the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools on 8 May 1919, in Pompeii. He was beatified by John Paul II on 26 October 1980, and on 25 February 2025, Pope Francis approved the votes in favour of the canonisation of the Blessed on 19 October 2025.
Bartolo Longo was born in the province of Brindisi in 1841 and, for a period of his life, after completing his law studies in Naples, he became involved in spiritualism, abandoning the Catholic faith, to which he would return after some time.
An anecdote related to his total conversion tells that in 1872, while travelling to Valle di Pompei to take care of the properties of Countess Marianna Farnararo, whom he would marry a few years later, while visiting the local countryside, he heard a voice saying to him at the sound of the bells: “If you spread the Rosary, you will be saved!”.
He thus decided not to leave those places without first spreading the cult of the Virgin of the Rosary. He renovated the small parish church of the Holy Saviour and decided to build a new church dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary. On 8 May 1876, the first stone of the new church was laid, and on 14 October 1883, twenty thousand pilgrims recited the Supplication to Our Lady of the Rosary there for the first time.
A series of charitable works established in favour of children and adolescents in difficult and compromised social environments made him famous. In 1887, he founded the Orphanage for Girls, which was the first of his charitable works, followed in 1892 by the hospice for the children of prisoners (run, from 1907, by the Brothers of the Christian Schools), after some prisoners turned to Bartolo Longo to urge him to take care of their children. Thus, he became convinced that not only could the children of prisoners be rehabilitated, but that they, in turn, could save their parents from despair.
Following this initiative, the daughters of prisoners were also welcomed in Pompeii, entrusted to the care of the Dominican Sisters, the ‘Daughters of the Holy Rosary of Pompeii’.
Bartolo Longo died at the age of eighty-five on 5 October 1926.
Pope Leo, addressing the pilgrims who had gathered in St. Peter’s Square during the audience on Sunday, 19 October, invited them to remember that “the cross of Christ reveals God’s justice. And God’s justice is forgiveness […] When we are crucified by pain and violence, by hatred and war, Christ is already there, on the cross for us and with us”, “let us ask ourselves”, continued the Pope, “when we hear the call of those in difficulty: are we witnesses of the Father’s love, as Christ was towards everyone?”. Bartolo Longo certainly accepted this call during his lifetime.
A temporary exhibition dedicated to Bartolo Longo is open to the public at the Generalate in Rome, organised by the Lasallian Heritage and Research Office, in collaboration with the Information and Communication Office.