Padre Pietro Lavini, 'God's Builder' - obituary

[cappie]

It's not often a Capuchin gets an obituary in a British newspaper.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11801354/Padre-Pietro-Lavini-Gods-Builder-obituary.html

Padre Pietro Lavini, who has died aged 88, was an Italian friar dubbed “God’s Builder” by Pope John Paul II after he spent 40 years single-handedly reconstructing a ruined medieval monastery in the Apennine mountains.
In 1965, Lavini and a fellow Capuchin friar ventured from the shrine where they were based in Italy’s Marches to the nearby remains of San Leonardo al Volubrio. Standing close to trade routes across the Sybilline range, this had been a place of worship and refuge since at least 1066. It had belonged for several centuries to an offshoot of the Benedictine order of monks, the Camaldolese, but by the late 16th century it had been abandoned.
In part, records attest, this was due to “the harshness of the place”. The monastery stands amid beech woods at 1,128 metres – higher than Mount Snowdon – and is more than an hour’s walk along a rough track from the nearest settlement, through a gorge known as the “mouth of Hell”. In winter, snow can cut it off for days on end from the world beyond.
Despite such a bleak setting, when Lavini returned from his outing, he began to be tormented by an inner voice which called on him to rebuild the church. The Capuchins have their roots in the Franciscan movement, and he also reflected on how St Francis’s vocation had stemmed from a vision instructing him to “go and repair my church which is in ruins”.

[Era Might]

Did he ever finish the church?

[cappie]

 

2000 Lavini’s tireless efforts enabled the church he had renovated stone by stone to be re-consecrated. In 2010, he finished the bell-tower, and last year an organ was installed. Only his own tomb remained to be built.