Page 202 - Reflections on St. Joseph

A second obstacle for Bishop Marello was the strong influence wielded in Acqui by Senator
Giuseppe Saracco, who was both ministry for public work in Rome and mayor of the city. Bishop
Marello did not become discourage not even when facing the strong liberal presence and, in the
administrative elections of 1889, there not being available any qualified laity, he placed in the
list of names the priest Fr. Ivaldi, treasurer of the seminary, who was elected a city councilor.
At Nizza Monferrato, instead, he called Count Cesare Balbo himself from Turin, who was elected
to the rolls of that city.

He then worked silently, as was his style, and in 1893, n the occasion of the episcopal jubilee of
Leo XIII, he led a pilgrimage to Rome and then to Pompei of more than 60 people belonging to
the work of the Congresses which, in the meantime, had been approved also by the new
archbishop of Turin, Bishop Davide Riccardi.

In this way, without aligning himself to either side, he looked only to the good of souls, forming
Catholic laity faithful to the Church and zealous in spreading Christian values, before the
proliferation of socialist worker societies, above all in the more industrial centers of the vast
Diocese of Acqui.

He was so convinced of the importance of forming good Catholic laity that he had proposed,
once he had finished with the pastoral visits to the parishes of the diocese, to make Catholic
Action his next priority. He was not able to do this because of his premature death six years into
his episcopacy, at the young age of 50 years and five months.

In 1892, he had also participated in the X National Congress of the work of the Congresses in
Genoa, in the centenary of the discovery of America, and there he had met the greatest
exponents of the Italian Catholic laity, from Count Medolaghi, exponent of the most
intransigent wing, to Professor Toniolo, who was the precursor of the social action of Catholics
in Italy and founder of the Catholic Social Weeks.

7 – Laity in the family of St. Joseph.

This, in summary, was St. Joseph Marello’s work in the area of laity. A work of spreading seeds
which brought forth fruits while he was living and continued to produce them even through
the years of this century.

In Asti, in fact, the activities which head begun would continue, above all by the work of Canon
G. Gamba, who was his spiritual child, and by the Graglia sisters, who kept alive as well the
associations of the “Lady Auxiliaries”, already foreseen by the draft of the Company of St. Joseph
in 1872.

Here is a memory from a talk by Bishop. Giuseppe Gamba, made in Asti in 1921, when he was
bishop of Novara: "Our mind – he said – runs at this moment to those piles of clothes for the
poor and laundry for the church, which each year by the hundreds piled up on the long table in
the large hall of Santa Chiara" .

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Reflections on st. joseph