Pope Leo XIV is to make seven people saints on 19th October 2025, including Bartolo Longo, an Italian lawyer who once served as a Satanic priest before his dramatic conversion to Catholicism.
The ceremony will be the first major canonisation since that of Blessed Carlo Acutis, the young Italian computer programmer known for his devotion to the Eucharist, and Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati earlier in Pope Leo’s papacy.
The Holy See Press Office confirmed the canonisations on 13th June, following approval at the first consistory of the new pontificate.
Among those to be canonised are Venezuelan physician José Gregorio Hernández Cisneros, often called the “doctor of the poor”, and María del Carmen Rendiles Martínez, founder of the Sisters Slaves of Jesus.
Others include Ignazio Choukrallah Maloyan, an Armenian bishop martyred during the Ottoman genocide; Peter To Rot, a lay catechist from Papua New Guinea executed during Japanese occupation; Vincenza Maria Poloni, founder of the Sisters of Mercy of Verona; and Maria Troncatti, a Salesian missionary to Ecuador’s Indigenous Shuar people.
However, according to The Catholic Herald, it is the inclusion of Bartolo Longo that has drawn particular attention.
Born in 1841 in Latiano, Italy, Longo became involved in occultism during his youth and was briefly ordained as a Satanic priest.
After years of despair, he renounced spiritualism, returned to the Church under the guidance of Dominican friars, and devoted his life to promoting the rosary and charitable works.
Longo founded orphanages, restored churches and established the Marian shrine at Pompeii, which remains one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in the world.
He died in 1926 aged 85 and was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1980, who named him the “Apostle of the Rosary.”