Blessed Nazareno Lanciotti

Nazareno Lanciotti was born in Rome on 3 March 1940 to a family from Subiaco. He entered the abbatial seminary and was ordained on 29 June 1966, serving until 1971 as assistant priest in the parish of San Giovanni Crisostomo in Rome. Having come to know Operazione Mato Grosso, he went in 1971, with his bishop's permission, to the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, and the following year settled in the village of Jauru in the far north-west of Brazil on the Bolivian border, where he began a fruitful apostolate. He worked there for thirty years, sustained by the Eucharist and by devotion to Our Lady. The parish of Jauru was erected under him in 1976; he founded fifty-seven rural ecclesial communities with daily Eucharistic adoration, a dispensary that became one of the most active hospitals of the region, a home for the elderly, a school for hundreds of children whom he also fed, and a minor seminary.

From 1987 he belonged to the Marian Movement of Priests, becoming its national head for Brazil. On the evening of 11 February 2001 two hooded gunmen entered his house as he was finishing supper with collaborators, and he was mortally wounded.