Luis Amigó

Luis Amigó

Luis Amigó (real name José María Amigó y Ferrer ; religious name : Fr. Luis de Masamagrell ; born October 17, 1854 in Massamagrell ; † October 1, 1934 in Valencia ) was a Spanish Capuchin , Roman Catholic bishop and founder of the order.

Early years

On October 17, 1854, José María Amigó was born in Massamagrell, a village near Valencia , the fourth of six children. A few years later the family moved to downtown Valencia. Since the autumn of 1866 he attended the seminary as an external student and became a member of Catholic associations in which he was committed to disadvantaged children, the sick and prisoners. On November 6, 1870, his father, who had been a lawyer , died and only a year later, on August 10, 1871, his mother too. Luis Amigó describes both parents in his autobiography as very pious, kind-hearted and devoted to God. A priest friend of mine took care of José Marías and his siblings. He postponed his plan to become a Carthusian because he felt responsible for bringing up his younger sisters. In March 1873, José María joined the Franciscan lay movement, the so-called Third Order of St. Francis.

Entry into the order, ordination and reconstruction of the third order

After an older brother was available as a breadwinner and the future of the siblings seemed secure, José María Amigó left his home in 1874 without consulting his family and traveled by ship to France to realize his plan to join the order. This was not possible in Spain at the time due to the ban on religious orders that had prevailed in large parts of the country since the Queen was deposed by radical liberal forces in 1868 and the outbreak of the Third Carlist War . On April 12, 1874, he joined the Capuchin Order in Bayonne . From now on he was called Brother Luis de Masamagrell ( val . : Lluís de Massamagrell ). On April 18, 1875, he finished the novitiate and made his first profession . In March 1877 he belonged to the group of the first Capuchins who returned to Spain after the end of the expulsion to repopulate the monasteries of the order. First he came to Antequera in Andalusia this way . In January 1879 he was transferred to the convent of Montehano in the province of Santander in northern Spain, where he was ordained a priest in March. He began his pastoral activities with youth and prisoners. On August 2, 1881, he returned to the reopened convent of his birthplace Massamagrell near Valencia and was entrusted as spiritual guide with the reconstruction of the lay movement of the Third Order.

Order founder

In the course of his work with Catholic lay people, he increasingly encountered the need in his environment to combine charitable work with life in a monastic community and, according to his conviction , was prompted by God's inspiration to find a Franciscan rule of life that was suitable for this according to his ideas to compose.

On May 5, 1885, Luis Amigó and a group of religious women who had come together for a number of years to a monastery-like community life founded the order of the Capuchin Terziarinnen of the Holy Family , whose founding house is on the Montiel mountain near Benaguasil near Massamagrell is located. During a cholera epidemic that struck Valencia that same year, the founding sisters devoted themselves to caring for the sick in Amigó's hometown of Massamagrell, a number of which died. A few years later, on April 12, 1889, took place in Torrent establishing a male congregation held at Valencia, whose Constitutions ( religious statutes ) also Luis Amigó had written. The Capuchin Terces of Our Lady of Pain , who today also call themselves Amigonians after their founder , were supposed to be involved in the care and upbringing of neglected boys and criminals. On October 29, 1890, the brothers in Madrid began teaching young people who had committed criminal offenses in Spain's first educational home , the boarding school Escuela de Reforma de Santa Rita , which had recently opened .

Both associations are organized as congregations under canon law and, as part of the Regulated Third Order, belong to the religious family of St. Francis of Assisi .

Provincial, Bishop and Senator

Statue of Luis Amigó in Segorbe

On December 1, 1898, Brother Lluís was elected the first provincial superior of the re-established Capuchin Province of Valencia.

On June 9th, 1907 Luis Amigó was ordained titular bishop of Thagaste in Madrid and on July 28th he took up his post as apostolic administrator in Solsona , a small town in Catalonia with about 2,500 inhabitants at the time. At that time there were around 118,000 believers in the diocese. On November 13, 1913, Amigó became bishop of Segorbe , a small town in the province of Valencia with around 7,000 inhabitants at the time . There were about 90,000 believers in this diocese. Luis Amigó's extensive teaching post is shown in a total of 48 pastoral letters that he wrote between 1907 and 1933 in Solsona and Segorbe.

Since April 23, 1914, Luis Amigó represented the ecclesiastical province of Valencia in the Senate , the Spanish upper house, as senator , and was confirmed in this office for another five years in 1919.

On June 11, 1920, Bishop Amigó inaugurated the reform home in Amurrio in the Basque Country, which was built with the help of wealthy patrons of the founder of the order and run by the Amigonians, with the name Casa del Salvador ("Savior House"). There, in the period up to the civil war, novel educational methods based on the Catholic faith and scientifically based, were tested and implemented for the educational system in Spain at that time. Luis Amigó himself took an active part in the development of the founding of his orders throughout his life and was extremely interested in the further development of pedagogy and its foundation in his Christian, at the same time worldly and redemption-oriented spirituality .

Death and beatification

On October 1, 1934, Luis Amigó died at the age of almost eighty in Godella near Valencia in the seminary of the men's congregation he founded. He was buried in the mother house of the Capuchin Terziarinnen in his native Massamagrell.

The church beatification process for Luis Amigó began with the information process opened on January 18, 1950 in the Archdiocese of Valencia and was in 1952 by Pope Pius XII. approved. This preliminary episcopal trial, in which life testimonies and testimonies are collected, was converted into an apostolic process under the new canon law in 1977, resumed in 1979 and finally concluded in 1982. After the results had been confirmed in 1985 and the reports of the Roman authorities were completely available in 1987, Pope John Paul II established the virtuous life of the Capuchin in 1992 and awarded him the title of Venerable Servant of God , a further procedural step in the beatification process. For a beatification of Luis Amigós, it would now need the recognition of a miracle by the church. The files remain with the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in Rome .

See also

• List of the founders of the order

Individual evidence

1. ↑ positio sobre las virtudes del P. Luis Amigó y Ferrer. Terciarios Capuchinos , Madrid 1990, p. XV f.