On December 18 Pope Leo XIV received in audience Card. Marcello Semeraro, Prefect of the Dicastery of the Causes of Saints, and authorized publication of the decree regarding the heroic virtues of the Servant of God Berardo Atonna, professed priest of the Order of Friars Minor, born in Episcopio di Sarno on July 1, 1843, and died in Naples on March 4, 1917.
The Venerable Berardo Atonna was formed in his youth in the austere and penitent spirituality of the Friars Minor Alcantarine of Naples, among whom he made his first profession in 1860.
He lived the first years of his priesthood exclaustrated, owing to the suppression of convents as decreed by the Italian liberal government. He therefore settled for some time in his native city of Sarno where he continued to exercise his ministry with zeal. Reestablished in the common life, he returned in 1873 to the convent of Santa Maria Occorrevole in Piedmonte d’Alife to dedicate himself to prayer, study, and preaching, following the example of St. John Joseph of the Cross who had lived a long time in that place.
Father Atonna gave his life to countless popular missions in Campania, Apulia, Molise. He aroused authentic conversions with the proclamation of the Word of God and the apostolate of confession. He approached every class of person, with preference for the weakest and abandoned. He dedicated himself to heal the moral and material wounds of the people of God with the exercise of mercy and tenderness. He had special compassion for the sick. He spread the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the practice of the Via Crucis. He had the gift of counsel and supported the birth of new female religious families, including the Franciscan Sisters Alcanterine of Castellammare di Stabia.
When in 1897 Pope Leo XIII ordered the merger of the Franciscan families into the single Order of Friars Minor simpliciter dicti, Father Atonna, while loving the tradition of the Alcantarine branch, worked to promote the implementation of the reform aiming at the spiritual good that would derive from it for the individual friars and for the fraternities. In this circumstance, he was appointed ex officio First Minister Provincial of the newly constituted Province of the Friars Minor of St. James of the Marches, from 1902 to 1905. In this capacity he had to endure slander and refusals from those friars who had not accepted the decree of union with a serene soul, providing that he was always humble and ready for forgiveness.
He spent the last years of his life in Naples on behalf of the charitable work “Casa San Giuseppe” built on the hill of Capodimonte to welcome elderly and young women of the people and directed by the Franciscan Missionary Sisters of Mary, for which he was chaplain, father, master and spiritual guide.
His contemporaries identified in him the characteristics of the authentic friar minor, in the contemplative and apostolic dimension of St. Francis of Assisi, and wanted to hand down his memory to future generations, starting the Cause of Beatification in 1930.
