Blessed Bartolomeo Longo
The Occultist and the Rosary
Join me today to meet a Blessed who went from being a satanic ‘priest’ to a holy knight.
Name: Bartolomeo (Bartolo) Longo
Life: 1841 - 1926
Status: Blessed
Feast: October 5th
You can listen to this as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify or right here on Substack. If you prefer video, you can also follow on YouTube and Odysee (unfortunately, videos on Odysee may be slower to update).
The weight of the past caught up with Bartolomeo Longo on a business trip in 1872.
Longo was being sent to figure out whether it was possible to get the rents owed to his employer from people who were technically her tenants The tenants lived near the ancient ruins of Pompeii, the city in the West of modern Italy that had been destroyed by a volcano in 79 AD.
Once Longo got there and started looking around, it was easy to see why they weren’t paying. The tenants had nothing to give. The area was impoverished and violent. The people had no access to education or social services. The only order came from organized crime, the Camorra.
Bartolomeo Longo wandered through the area. His guards - Camorra men - showed him to the church. It was old, a little building left over from the middle ages. Rats scurried into the shadows as he went in. The altar had holes where worms had dug through it. Most locals never went there.
If there was a shadow over this desolate place, Bartolomeo Longo had shadows of his own, and for some time now they had been darkening around him. In years passed, Bartolomeo Longo had been an occultist and a medium. He had looked, as he might have put it at the time, beyond the veil, and something malevolent had looked back at him. And in his youth, Bartolomeo Longo had promised himself to this entity and become what he now believed was a satanic priest. He had tried to return to the Church. Here by the ruins of Pompeii, he wondered again whether the devil still had a claim on his soul. Maybe, he thought, slipping closer to despair, if he was hellbound anyway, he should kill himself now and just get it over with.
Bartolomeo Longo was as low as he had ever been.
And it was at that moment, at his lowest point, in an empty field near Pompeii, that Bartolomeo Longo had a religious experience. He heard a voice repeating a promise of the rosary, one made to Saint Dominic, that one who propagates the rosary will be saved. And suddenly, he saw it. He saw the life he was supposed to live. He dropped to his knees in the empty field as he understood the strange, impossible mission that lay ahead of him. He was going to spread the rosary. He was going to be saved. And he was going to do it right here, next to the ruins of Pompeii.
First, he was going to have to contact his employer and let her know that there had been a total change of plans.
Bartolomeo Longo’s story had begun in a simpler place and time. Bartolomeo - Bartolo for short - was born into the minor aristocracy in 1841 near Brindisi. Today Brindisi is in Italy, on the heel of the Italian boot. But back then, the South of modern Italy was part of another kingdom, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
In 1848, when Bartolo was still just a little boy, tremors and revolutions had appeared throughout Europe. People wanted many different things: more democracy, votes for women, racial equality, temperance, more freedom from the Church, atheism, fair wages, nationalism, scientific and moral progress. And although most of the actual rebellions failed, they left behind them the seeds that grew into the form of liberalism that is triumphant across the West today.
But for Bartolo, in the sleepy Catholic Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, such things seemed like far away problems. Young Bartolo grew up in a comfortably Catholic environment. He thought he might be a teacher, so he went off to a boarding school, and then spent time with a tutor.
Bartolo was, perhaps, a little headstrong, but his heart was in the right place. One year when he was young he saved his entire food budget by eating nothing but potatoes. He was saving up to buy a harpsichord. Soon his education was complete. His family had enough that he could live comfortably and work a little. By the time he turned 19, he was handsome and reasonably well off. And he had the really important skills that made him an eligible young bachelor: he could dance well, ride well, and he was good with a sword.
And then the world changed. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was overthrown. It became part of the emerging nation of modern Italy. By Italian standards, Bartolo was a backwater aristocrat and his education by tutor counted for nothing. If he wanted to get ahead in the new world, he would have to go to a proper university and get a real degree. But Bartolomeo Longo was only 19, so the prospect of going back to school was not such a terrible one. Longo decided that he should use the challenge as an opportunity. He went to Naples and enrolled in the University of Naples, studying law.
And it was in Naples that Longo began to encounter the ideas that had fueled the revolutions of 1848. He found that many of his fellow students resented the Church, because it stood in the way of Italian unification: the pope still directly ruled the lands of the Papal States. Longo took a philosophy course from a defrocked priest who argued that religion was all nonsense anyway. Like many young people who enter university unprepared, Longo found himself drifting away from his faith.
And then, in 1864, another student invited Bartolomeo Longo to a séance. They would go and sit in the dark with others as a medium tried to receive messages from the world of spirits. Longo was impressed, and went back again and again.
SĂ©ances were another legacy of 1848. In that year of upheaval, two American sisters, Margaretta and Catherine Fox, convinced their neighbours in in Hydesville, New York, that they were receiving communications from spirits. The spirits spoke through strange knocking and tapping sounds, suspiciously like the new technology of the Morse code. The idea caught on. Soon, millions of people in the United States were spiritualists, and dozens of magazines promoted spiritualist ideas.
Part of what made spiritualism take off the way it did was that the kind of séances that the Fox sisters put on were easy to fake - the sisters later claimed they had been faking them from the start. But many people were true believers, and soon everyone who was anyone was attending séances, from the author Mark Twain to the philosopher William James to the scientists Pierre and Marie Curie. In England Queen Victoria went to séances hoping for a last word from Prince Albert, while in the United States Mary Todd Lincoln was using the same method to get a last bit of wisdom from Honest Abe.
The spiritualist trend had emerged so quickly that even Christians weren’t sure what to make of it. Some people considered it magic. Others thought it was, perhaps, just a new kind of science. Others, like the magician Harry Houdini, fixated on exposing mediums as charlatans. Slowly, the Christian view came to be what was expressed in the wonderful title of an 1866 book by a Protestant minister: Spiritualism identical with ancient sorcery, New Testament demonology, and modern witchcraft : with the testimony of God and man against it.
Still, in those first years of spiritualism, many, many young people were swept along into it - and one of those young people was Bartolomeo Longo. He went from spectator to medium. Many mediums claimed to have a spirit who helped them. Longo made contact with an entity that he believed was the Archangel Michael. He advanced in his group, taking the lead in their ceremonies. Gradually he was initiated in a leading role, what he would later describe as a ‘priest’.
Longo finished his legal studies. He had enough family money to stay on in Naples. And that was good because the entity he was speaking with kept pushing him to give more and more of himself. It told him not to eat. It told him to keep certain symbols with him at all times. It wouldn’t let him sleep. He had always had a bad stomach - he blamed it on the year he had eaten nothing but potatoes. Now his stomach problems were back with a vengeance.
In one way, Bartolomeo Longo could see that things were not good, but he had trouble understanding what had gone wrong. He tried communicating with the spirit of his now dead father to get some advice. That didn’t help. Finally, he thought of an older Catholic friend of the family, a professor in the city. Longo went to see him.
The professor was shocked at how the boy he had known had changed. He was obviously sick, and the professor had no doubt that Longo was dealing with something demonic. The professor persuaded Longo to go see a Dominican priest - Father Alberto Radente. By the time Longo had psyched himself up for that conversation, he was so ragged and scruffy looking that Father Radente thought he was being mugged until he realized that Longo was asking him to hear his confession.
As the two began to talk, Radente realized what needed to be done. Over the next month, he led Longo away from spiritualism. Longo came to recognize that the entity he had thought was the Archangel Michael was not an angel, or at least, it had not been an angel for a very long time. To his own horror Longo came to understand that he had been a priest to something satanic. Carefully, Father Radente led him through repentance and confession and back to the Church. It was not an easy path, and as a focus for Longo’s troubled mind, the priest pointed him to the rosary. Longo would pray the rosary again and again when he was not certain what else to do.
And so it was that Bartolomeo Longo found himself in Naples, trying to put back together the fragments of his life. He became a Dominican Tertiary. Then, for a while, he tried to return to the easier country life he had known. But in the end, he found himself back in Naples, working with Father Radente in the slums. And it was the priest, Father Radente, who found him his next job.
Countess Marianna Farnararo de Fusco di Lettere was 27 years old, a widow with a legendary temper, a total devotion to the Church, and a need for a man with a the skills to educate her five young children and also manage her considerable estates. Father Radente suggested that Bartolomeo Longo might be ideal, and Longo went to work for Countess de Fusco. He was a good fit.
Although Longo enjoyed working for the countess, and was good at it, the shadow of the past still hung over him as he came to the ruins of Pompey in 1872. Officially he was there to figure out why no one was paying rent. Privately, he was grappling with thoughts of suicide. But then, out in a field, he heard a voice telling him that whoever propagated the rosary would be saved. And in Longo’s mind, everything snapped into place.
He contacted the countess from near Pompeii to tell her the news.
Not only was he not going to figure out how to get the rent from the people on her land who owed her money. He was going to do the exact opposite. He was going to spend the rest of his life trying to propagate the rosary, and beyond that, to help these people. Did the countess want in?
It wasn’t much of a plan. Anyone could see that it would take a miracle to fix the impoverished, crime infested area. A different employer would have fired him, or laughed at him. But the countess had seen enough of Longo to trust him. She asked what he needed her to do.
Longo began to speak to anyone who would listen. He went door to door, talking about the rosary. And with the countess’ help, he built a church in the area. It would be a shrine dedicated - of course - to Our Lady of the Rosary.
Longo knew that if any of this was to work, the locals would have to be drawn to the shrine. He went in search of a beautiful altar painting, something that would speak to those who saw it - but then fate intervened. Some time earlier, Father Radente had found an old, banged up painting of Our Lady of the Rosary. He had given it to some nuns. When the nuns heard about Bartolomeo Longo’s strange project to revitalize the area near Pompeii, they contributed the painting as a gift. Longo had seen enough to recognize Providence at work.
But when the painting arrived, it was all wrong.
When I first saw it, my heart sank. Not only was it a worn-out old canvas, but also the Madonna’s face, rather than that of a benevolent Virgin full of sanctity and grace, seemed to belong to a rough, coarse housewife. In my heart I felt that the poor Pompeiians would have a hard time concentrating on their prayers faced with such an ugly image. (Ingrid Rowland translation)
The painting had holes in it. Chunks of paint were missing, and even where there was paint, it was starting to crack. The original painter had not done a great job depicting Our Lady or Saint Rosa beside her. And as for Saint Dominic, in Longo’s opinion, he:
…on the right looked not like a saint, but the village idiot.
Not exactly sure why he was doing it, Longo put the painting up on the altar. No one was inspired.
Or, almost no one. An artist in Naples saw the painting and realized that it had potential, it just needed to be thoroughly ‘restored’. By the time he had finished, the painting was beautiful. It was the central focus that Longo had hoped for. He put the painting into the shrine.
And then, Bartolomeo Longo got his miracle.
Or rather, he got his miracles. Healings began to be reported at the shrine. The locals began to pray the rosary and to return to the Church. And pilgrims began to come from outside the area to see the miraculous picture. Soon, the shrine was busy all the time, and money was pouring in.
Bartolomeo Longo began to build. Soon New Pompeii had its own train station. Then a post office, a telegraph office, schools, hotels, a treatment centre for orphans, nurseries, artisans’ shops, aqueducts to bring in clean water, plazas, fountains, trees in the streets, cheap housing for workers, a school specializing in children whose parents were in prison, a printing press that produced a popular Catholic magazine, and an observatory. Organized crime sank back into the shadows. Everywhere he could, Longo set the city up to help the people who lived in it. When temporary labourers were needed, Longo set up their rents to pay into buying their apartments for them outright. Building this new city became Longo’s life’s work. It was going to be the answer he had been looking for as a student: a living example of something that was both modern and in the service of God.
In 1887 New Pompeii was launched officially, dedicated, of course, to Our Lady of the Rosary. Longo wrote:
The first hour of the New Pompeii, of a city that rises again next to the ruins of the famous ancient pagan city, was struck on the memorable day of May 8, 1887. On that day a people that rises again had its baptism. And from that day began the history of this people that, illuminated by Religion, is born again to the benefits of modern civilization.
There would be challenges, of course. People started to complain that Longo’s working relationship with the countess was inappropriate. Pope Leo XIII, who was delighted with the new shrine and the city around it, heard about the problem and told them that the solution was simple. Get married. They did.
The next pope, Pius X, was suspicious about the finances of the shrine. He audited it - but found nothing amiss.
And so Bartolomeo Longo and his wife continued to build the city that was, in truth, their city. They were entering their 80s in the 1920s. In 1924 the countess died. Longo would only outlive her by two years, and he was making no secret of how excited he was that the day he would meet Mary, his Patroness, was quickly coming closer.
In the meantime, it left the Church with a question. What do you call a man like Bartolomeo Longo, a man who stumbles into darkness and despair, but then at the last moment finds hope and salvation? And what do you call him if he transforms a desolate place into a holy city? The first part of an answer came in 1925, when Bartolomeo Longo was made a knight, in the Order of the Knights of the Holy Sepulcher. With Blessed Bartolomeo Longo on the path to sainthood, it seems that the second part of the answer is still to come.
If you enjoy the Manly Saints Project, please consider signing up for a subscription on Substack, or click here or on the logo below to buy me a beer.
THis was very well written!
Fascinating.