Pietro Casaretto

Pietro Casaretto, O.S.B. (1810-1878) was an Italian Benedictine monk who established the Subiaco Congregation, an international federation of Benedictine monasteries, now part of the Subiaco Cassinese Congregation.

Life He was born Francesco Casaretto in Ancona in 1810 into a family of merchants from Genoa, the eldest son of Giacomo and Maddalena Casaretto.Although always sickly, at the age of 17 he was admitted into the novitiate of the Abbey of Santa Maria del Monte in Cesena, which was part of the Cassinese Congregation headquartered at the ancient Abbey of Santa Giustina in Padua, and he was given the religious name by which he is now known. He professed religious vows as a member of the abbey on 17 August 1828.

Almost immediately Casaretto began a series of moves from one monastery to another, in a futile effort to find a climate that suited his health. These frequent moves not only left him with a lifelong urge for travel but prevented him from expanding on the little education he had received as a child. What he came to find in these various communities began to disappoint him in his desire to be a good monk.

A mediocre way of life had developed in these abbeys, due above all to the prolonged interruption of their life during the occupation of Italy by the French Revolutionary Army and subsequent French governments, which had closed most of the monasteries for nearly a quarter of a century. Even when restored, the monasteries were uncertain as to their continued existence, because of the apparently inevitable progress of the Risorgimento with its anti-clerical ideology. During the suppression the monks had had to support themselves as parish priests or to live with their families. In the struggle to fend for themselves during this long interval, they had acquired habits which were hard to shed on their return to the monasteries, and which they knew they might have to resume at any time. Instead of living entirely from the community's resources, as mandated by the Rule of St. Benedict, individual monks retained small reserves of private property.

Casaretto set about transforming the parish house into a monastery, for which he enlisted the Master of novices of the Abbey of Subiaco as a companion, and soon recruited a small group of candidates to monastic life. One new feature of this congregation, breaking with monastic tradition, was the establishment of a single abbot for the congregation, titled the Abbot General, with the Superior of each monastery being titled simply a prior, who was to be elected triennially, rather than for life. This step drew the criticism of excessive centralization of monastic life, but the new congregation thrived, and received final papal approval in 1872, only five years after its inauguration.

died in Genoa on 1 July 1878, outside the monastic community.