Pietro Casaretto

Rt. Rev. Dom Pietro Casaretto, O.S.B.
Abbot General, Subiaco Congregation
Elected	1867
Term ended	1878
Other posts	President, Cassinese Congregation (1851-1867); Abbot, Abbey of Subiaco (1851-1867); Abbot, Abbey of San Giuliano d'Albaro (1844-1851)
Orders
Ordination	1840
Personal details
Birth name	Francesco Casaretto
Born	1810 Ancona, Papal States
Died	1878 Kingdom of Italy
Nationality	Italian
Denomination	Roman Catholic

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.

He was born Francesco Casaretto in Ancona in 1810 into a family of merchants who had moved originated in Genoa. 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 the following year.

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. Family ties counted for a great deal, even within the monastery—a situation strongly condemned in the Rule. In regards to their spirituality, greater store was set by the kind of devotional exercises and pious practices suitable for a parish priest than by the liturgy performed in common. The political divide in Italy between those who welcomed the movement for national unification and those who defended the status quo gave rise to factions within monastic communities.

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