Giovanni Semeria
[7] By the time he left Rome and relocated to Genoa in 1895 he had acquired a burgeoning reputation as a teacher, a writer of articles on church matters, and as a preacher.
[7] Two years later he was invited to preach the 1897 Lent sermons at the basilica San Lorenzo in Damaso in Rome where he attracted crowds that overflowed up the altar steps and into the apse beyond.
[8][9] The sermons greatly extended his reputation, and over the next few years he accepted invitations to preach in France, Belgium, Switzerland, England, Asia, Africa, and the United States.
[2] Silenced for the next two years, he was able to concentrate on ministering to families of the Italian expatriates who had moved to Belgium, attracted by the employment opportunities provided by the coal mines and associated heavy industries.
[1] On 19 July 1914 Semeria left for a break to visit his mother who by this time was staying with one of his childhood friends at Lopagno (TI) in Switzerland.
He spent the next few months in Geneva at the Bonomelliano Mission, helping to provide assistance to Italians abroad, and identified to his fellow monks as "Don Dosio, a priest from Piedmont".
At the same time, Marshall Cadorna, Chief of Staff of the Italian Army between 1914 and 1917, was on record as being personally in favour of the involvement of military chaplains on the frontline.
Semeria was still banned from entering Italy and there was no question of his crossing the border from Switzerland going unnoticed: there is shrill written evidence in surviving sources of consternation on the part of Cardinal de Lai and a number of others.
There were endless homilies to be delivered, conferences and intense conversations at many levels, masses on the frontline, confessions, visits to the wounded and a huge amount of correspondence to be handled, often in response to the "most unexpected requests".
It was during this period that one ambition above all others came to the fore, which Semeria shared with another military chaplain, Giovanni Minozzi from the Abruzzo: the war would one day end, and after it they should take care of all the orphans it had created.
[12] Fulfilling that ambition was the project to which, using all his gifts with the spoken and written word, Giovanni Semeria would devote the final decade of his life.
[11] War ended in 1918 and already in 1919 plans were well advanced for two orphanages; one in Amatrice across the mountains to the east of Rome, and a second in Gioia del Colle, far to the south, near Bari.
[7] War had left the principal nation states of Europe close to bankruptcy, and there was no longer so large a class of people as before 1914, willing to part with significant amounts of cash for Christian philanthropy.
[13] His skill as a public speaker combined with his first hand experience of the scale of the orphan issue created by the war to make him a highly effective fund raiser.
Semeria was more than content to guide the children towards skilled manual and artisanal trades, for which there were desperate labour shortages in the northern half of the country.
