If St. Gaspar Del Bufalo's language was a full torrent, that of Giovanni Merlini was the constant trickle of words well thought-out and weighed. While the working field of the former was the Church and knew no boundaries, the field of the latter had a hedge around it. Merlini liked to cultivate a definite terrain entrusted to him and bring it to fulfillment. Taught by the example of Gaspar, the great missionary who dreamed of a thousand tongues, Merlini loosened his own. In contact with Gaspar, the “spiritual earthquake,” Merlini, too, was a dynamic man engulfed by a thousand problems. His nature, however, was that of a methodical man who lists things to do and, one after the other according to their urgency, faces them with the calm of one who knows that the best way of doing a thing is to do it well.

Giovanni Merlini was born at Spoleto on August 28, 1795, to a pastry-maker of distant Messina origins and a very religious Umbrian woman, who, in deference to her husband’s wishes, lived a very retired life. The boy Merlini happened to find himself in the epochal passage between two centuries, “the one armed against the other” to quote Alessandro Manzoni in his ode to Napoleon. Unlike the French autocrat, Merlini did not seat himself as judge between those two centuries, because no one can take upon himself such a presumptuous right. Rather, he sought the will of God.  Merlini used to say:  “God’s will is enough for me.” God reveals that will to those who seek it.

He understood that he should be a priest and became one, overcoming the resistance of his father who saw him as the ideal man to continue the family lineage and the family business. The dreams of parents for the future of their children are always grandiose.

There is no arrival point in the search for God’s will: it is a continuous exploration and a never-ending intense work to discover it and carry it out. After a choice is made, another proposal shows up, in tune with the earlier one, because God chisels docile clay. After Merlini had become a priest he understood that it was the beginning of a new path to become more and more a priest, more and more the image of Christ. In his own discernment, he had to be a sure guide for the young men in the junior high school because the bishop had entrusted them to him. That was the vineyard he intended to cultivate with meticulous care and his thinking did not go much beyond the fence of that piece of God’s reign.

To be a better educator Merlini decided to go to San Felice di Giano, where he had learned that the famous Roman missionary Gaspar Del Bufalo would conduct a retreat for the clergy of the diocese. Giano, more precisely the Abbey of San Felice, was the place where a House of Mission had been functioning for five years. Its opening had marked the beginning of the Congregation of the Missionaries of the Most Precious Blood. Merlini went there with a companion priest. For both of them it was the encounter of a lifetime.

Gaspar, ever since Mons. Francesco Albertini had made him a Missionary of the Most Precious Blood, felt that redemption had to be brought to everyone. He had formulated a principle: “The general good of the Church must have precedence over the particular good.” Taking care of the high school students was important but in Spoleto there were many priests, even good ones, living in idleness. The clergy needed to be awakened, not only at Spoleto but everywhere. Missionaries were needed who would move around and, in a certain sense, make a sprinkling of Christ’s Blood fall anew on the people. It was not by accident that the people called Gaspar Del Bufalo’s followers the “Missionaries of the Shed Blood.”

During the retreat at San Felice, the plans of the two priests of Spoleto underwent a spiritual earthquake. At different times, they both had become Missionaries. Giovanni Merlini, especially, had a fundamental role in the organization of the Congregation of the Missionaries of the Most Precious Blood because Father Gaspar, continually moving from town to town, passed all the thorny questions on to Father Merlini.

Having been contacted by Maria De Mattias from Vallecorsa on the day after the mission preached by Gaspar, Fr. Merlini began directing her with loving meticulousness. This was the same way he entered into all the problems of the newborn institute of the Adorers of the Blood of Christ until Maria’s death.

Fr. Gaspar used to point to Fr. Giovanni as a model of holiness and would say: “The ‘Merlo’ (blackbird) flies high!” An ornithologist would not have agreed. The blackbird flies low. But in the field of holiness, the more one flies low (in the sense of service) the higher one rises in the love of God and neighbor. 

When Merlini died in Rome on January 1, 1873, Pope Pius IX said to the members of the consistory:  “You will have heard of the death of Fr. Giovanni Merlini.  He was a great saint and for us his death is a great loss.”