Blessed Clemente Vismara

Clemente Vismara was born at Agrate Brianza near Milan in 1897, the fifth child of a saddler and a seamstress, and was baptised the following day. His mother died when he was five, his father three years later, and while his older siblings went to boarding school he was raised by his grandmother and uncles, two of whom were priests. At fifteen he entered the minor seminary at Seveso, where his appetite for reading led him to devour Blessed Paolo Manna's Operarii autem pauci, which fired him for the mission ad gentes. The First World War delayed and hardened that resolve: called to arms, he saw what he called the complete degradation of man and understood that only for God is it worth spending a life.

On returning from the front he entered the Lombard Seminary for Foreign Missions, later the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions, and was ordained in Milan Cathedral on 26 May 1923. That August he sailed from Venice for Burma, a country he knew only from an atlas, and gave it his whole life, accepting climate, languages, isolation and poverty with enthusiasm and inventiveness.