Paolo Miraglia-Gulotti

Paolo Miraglia-Gulotti
Predecessor	Joseph René Vilatte
Successor	Frederick Ebenezer Lloyd
Orders
Ordination	1879 by Giovanni Battista Scalabrini
Personal details
Born	(1857-03-22)March 22, 1857 Ucria, Sicily, Kingdom of the Two Sicilies
Died	25 July 1918(1918-07-25) (aged 61) Chicago, Illinois
Nationality	Italian and American
Denomination	Christian (Old) Catholic Church,American Catholic Church

Paolo Vescovo Miraglia-Gulotti (March 22, 1857 – July 25, 1918) was a bishop for independent Catholic Churches in the Kingdom of Italy and the United States.

He is considered an episcopus vagans.

He was born to a Roman Catholic family in Ucria, Sicily, in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

Miraglia was a professor at the seminary of Patti at 19, was ordained a priest at 22, then a student at the University of Palermo.

He was censured in Sicily for his preaching. Paolo Miraglia-Gulotti, a priest from Ucria, Sicily, had been called to Rome early in 1895 by his friend, Monsignor Isidoro Carini, Perfect of the Vatican Library, to assist him in a new periodical, the Rivista delle scienze ecclesiastiche, Carini was an advocate of reconciliation between the Holy See and the Kingdom of Italy. Carini died suddenly, on June 25, 1895, rumored by poison, and the periodical was abandoned.

In the spring of the same year, 1895, Miraglia was sent to Piacenza, in Northern Italy, to preach the May sermons in honor of Mary; there he was embroiled in a series of either scandals or conspiracies. "It would be interesting to relate [...] the dramatic details of the conspiracies. But I leave them to the curious students of press and police reports. They are remarkably unpleasant reading. For my present purpose it is sufficient to speak of Miraglia now as a free man," wrote Paulina Irby, in National Review and noted that she omitted, among other events, "his terrible denunciations of the Jesuits" and the opening of his Oratorio di San Paolo, Chiesa Italiana Internationale, which began in a former stable of an old palazzo with church furnishing principally provided by Mazzini's niece, "and with much else that is expressive of loyal and national feeling, and which is not to be seen in any other place of worship with which I am acquainted in Italy." His congregation had just that church, and "is spoken of contemptuously as the congregation of Signor Abbate's stable", she wrote, as the Abbate family own the palazzo. On April 15, 1896, Miraglia, who resided in Piacenza but was a priest of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Patti, Sicily, was excommunicated for, what was called, his "incredible, audacious, and obstinant scandals which long troubled the Roman Catholic Diocese of Piacenza-Bobbio". That year, Nevin introduced in The Churchman the "modern Savonarola", Nevin wrote "he has placed himself under wise guidance, and will not be apt to do anything rashly or ignorantly" but failed to include any specifics. The following week, The Churchman only hinted at the secular side of that movement by publishing a story from Milan's Corriere della Sera which wrote: "The struggle is now not only religlious, but civic. The partisans of the bishop will hear of no truce with the partisans of Miraglia, and whenever they can, remove them from the employments that they hold." Within a year, on August 31, 1897, he attended the Union of Utrecht's 4th International Old Catholic Congress in Vienna.