Gaspar del Bufalo

About Gaspar del Bufalo

Gaspar del Bufalo was born in Rome on 6 January 1786. His father worked as a cook at the Palazzo Altieri, and Gaspar studied at the Collegio Romano. Before ordination, he taught catechism and helped poor people in the city. The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints particularly remembers his instruction of cart drivers who came into Rome from the countryside. He was ordained a priest in 1808 and continued work among ordinary people.

The account published by his congregation says Gaspar refused an oath to Napoleon’s government. It recounts four years of exile and imprisonment, with his ministry interrupted and his mother dying while he was away. The remembered words of refusal are not treated here as a verbatim transcript. Following the fall of Napoleon, Gaspar returned to Rome in 1814 and worked with the preacher Gaetano Bonanni. During a mission near Giano, he encountered the abandoned Abbey of San Felice, which became the setting for his new community.

Pius XII later dated the opening of the Missionaries of the Precious Blood’s first house to 15 August 1815. In his canonization address, the pope described Gaspar’s repeated journeys across central Italy and his concern for people’s bodily and spiritual needs. The address is a later church interpretation of Gaspar’s work, but it identifies the congregation’s mission as active preaching rather than enclosed monastic life.

The congregation describes missions that taught children, reached working people, and visited the sick and imprisoned. It also records the difficulty of repairing San Felice and sustaining a new missionary house. The community had to gather members and carry its preaching from town to town.

John Paul II recalled that Pius VII asked Gaspar’s missionaries to go where others did not wish to go, including bandit-affected districts between Rome and Naples. Some contemporaries criticized the venture as too novel. This papal recollection supports the direction of the mission, but it does not measure how much violence or crime changed because of it.

The congregation distinguishes Gaspar’s foundation from Maria De Mattias’s: influenced by his preaching, she founded the Adorers of the Blood of Christ in 1834. The same account says Gaspar died in Rome on 28 December 1837 after ministry during a cholera outbreak. He was beatified in 1904 and canonized in 1954. His missionary community continued to preach and serve after his death.