30 September 2009

Know your SoG's

'Fuoco d'Amore' by Emilio Nembrini. www.fratommaso.eu/quadri/
The vice postulator of the cause for canonization of the Servant of God Thomas Acerbis of Olera, a Capuchin of the Venice Province, recently asked me to assist him in locating an article about the friar written in 1960. Fortunately, the Order's Central Library in Rome had the issue of Round Table of Franciscan Research containing the article so I was able to procur it without much difficulty. Through the semi-miracle of scanners and optical character recognition software, I was able to digitize it. The OCR software, however, insisted on recognizing every fly speck and stray bit of ink as a letter so producing a readable document still took several hours of labor on my part <insert sighing sounds here>.

So as to maximize the return on my efforts, I offer the finished product here for the enjoyment of my readers. Recall that this was written before Vatican Council II so some of the terminology (especially in reference to our separated brethren) and the sentiments expressed can be a bit jarring.

Note that while the author of the article spells Thomas' surname as "Acerbi", nearly everyone else spells it "Acerbis". An Internet search turned up over 9,000 hits on "Tommaso Acerbis", including the official website for his cause for canonization. Unfortunately, there seems to be very little published about him in English.

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