Aloysius Gentili

He remained in Rome, attending theological lectures whilst residing at the Irish College in order to improve his English, and after his ordination to the priesthood, in 1830, proceeded to Domodossola to make his novitiate.

[1] Whilst Gentili was living at the Irish College, Ambrose Phillips de Lisle, a young English gentleman who had been converted to Roman Catholicism while a student at Cambridge, arrived in Rome.

This zealous convert applied to the rector of the Irish College to obtain a priest to preach the Catholic Faith in the neighbourhood of his ancestral home.

This led to a great friendship between the young priest and de Lisle, the submission of the whole project to Rosmini, and eventually to the coming of Gentili and other fathers to England in 1835.

The result was that during August of the following year, Lockhart came to visit Father Gentili at Loughborough and was received into the Catholic Church, and a little later, entered as a postulant of the Order.

In 1848 Gentili gave his great mission in Dublin, where, in spite of the political excitement of that year, the confessionals were so crowded, that the priests often sat there without a break from the last instruction at night till the Mass on the following morning.