Joseph De Piro

Giuseppe De Piro or Joseph De Piro, (2 November 1877 – 17 September 1933) was a Roman Catholic priest and missionary. He founded the Missionary Society of St Paul (MSSP) in June 1910 with a charism to form missionaries following the example of St Paul. A Servant of God, he is a candidate for beatification.

Life

De Piro was born in Mdina, Malta on 2 November 1877. He was a student at the University of Malta when he decided to switch from the study of law to preparing for the priesthood.

De Piro was ordained to the priesthood in 1902 in Rome. Although he was involved in various ministries within the church, his main concern was the missions and work amongst the poor. he waited eleven years for the official approval by the local bishop and seventeen years before Brother Joseph Caruana became the first Paulist missionary, and was sent to Ethiopia, where he remained until his death in 1975 at the age of 83.

De Piro started off with a small community in Mdina, and died at the age of 55 in 1933 when the society was in its very initial stages.

The first foundation in Australia in 1948 had been in Sydney three years earlier than the foundation in Melbourne. Both cities had a huge concentration of Maltese people, 23,000 in Melbourne alone.