Padre Semeria

A lucky find for this Sunday! I’ve bought last week in a flea market several pictures for my blog. Among them, two which were taken by the same photograph, and show an Italian chaplain “in action”. This chaplain is one of the 2,200 Italian chaplains of the Great War, but, thanks to the help of my friend Filippo Lombardi, we are able to give a name to him: this is indeed Padre Giovanni Semeria (1867 – 1931), who was a catholic orator and writer, and one of the most important figures of Italian catholicism of the first half of the 20th century.

The first picture shows him in uniform: he’s the bearded man with glasses at the center of the picture. There are three other chaplains with him, you can guess the cross above the pocket of the uniform of the one who holds a book on the right.

The second photographs shows us him during a service.He’s not in a church, but in front of a Casa del Soldato, a network of places fonded by Don Giovanni Minozzi, similar to the YMCA structures, where soldiers could rest, read books, write letters and even learn to write.

Here’s a portrait of Padre Semeria, taken from Wikipedia:

If you’re interested in this topic and want to know more about it, here are a few links (in Italian)

– an essay about Padre Semeria during the Great War written by Filippo M. Lovison

– an article about Italian chaplains during the Great War

– another article about Italian chaplains during the Great War