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The saints

St. John Leonardi

A pharmacist who became a priest, taught the catechism, and helped launch the missions.

Feast: 9 October · 1541 to 1609 · Reformation and missions · Lucca and Rome, Italy

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A plain typographic plate: St. John Leonardi, with the feast day.

Typographic plate by Stone & Incense: we found no public-domain image of this saint we could verify.

Home / The saints / St. John Leonardi

Lucca, Italy, the 1570s

John trained and worked as a pharmacist in Lucca.1

He became a priest and began teaching children the catechism.1

His reforms angered people in his own city, and he spent much of his life exiled from it.

Patron of pharmacists1

01St. John Leonardi

Missions

He helped found a seminary in Rome that grew into the missionary college of Propaganda Fide.1

Live it this week

Bring medicine to someone sick

John was a pharmacist first. Pick up a prescription or groceries this week for someone who is sick or homebound.

Notes

How we know · 1 source for this page
  1. Franciscan Media, Saint of the Day: “Saint John Leonardi”. franciscanmedia.org. franciscanmedia.org

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: World English Bible, Catholic edition (public domain); Verse numbers are modern, with Douay-Rheims numbers in brackets where they differ. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an errorCorrections.