How a 19th-Century Satanic Priest Became a Catholic Saint

Over the 85 years of Bartolo Longo’s life, his spirituality took remarkable turns. Raised Catholic, the lawyer and jurist later embraced spiritualism and became a Satanist priest before dedicating his life to the Catholic Church. After his death in 1926, his tomb became a place of pilgrimage.

In October 2025, Pope Leo XIV canonized Longo in a ceremony at the Vatican. Today, the Catholic Church honors him as a saint, one specifically dedicated to helping those with mental health issues.

So how did Longo's spiritual journey inspire such devotion? The story is one of 19th-century Italian politics, ancient ruins and occultism. 

Longo was raised Catholic in Latiano, a town in southern Italy's Brindisi province. The Longos had their son educated at a religious boarding school. But as Longo came of age in 1860s Italy, he drifted away from the Catholic Church amid sweeping social and political changes. The Risorgimento movement, which ultimately brought the various Italian states under the flag of a single Italy in 1861, attracted nationalists and others who thought the Vatican held too much power.

According to the Dominican Order, Longo left his hometown in 1861 to attend the University of Naples, where he fell in with occultist circles. They suggested he try communicating with the world beyond to contact his father, who had died 10 years earlier. His fellow students often protested against the papacy, and belief in witchcraft, demons and other spiritual beings was quite widespread during this time.

"I, too, grew to hate monks, priests and the Pope,” Longo later wrote. Instead, he turned his admiration toward his professors and fellow students, who he viewed as “the sons of progress, the defenders of science, the champions of every sort of freedom.”

By the time Longo began studying law, he had found a higher purpose in spiritualism, a 19th-century movement that elevated mediums, psychics and other communicators who claimed to access the realm of the dead. 

As the story goes, Longo was so taken with these belief systems that he explored religions far darker than parlor magic; he fell so far from his Catholic roots as to be consecrated as a priest of the Satanic order.

In Joan Carroll Cruz’s book Lay Saints, she quotes from Longo’s writings: 

But within the decade, Longo returned to Catholicism and became a lay member of the Third Order of Saint Dominic, thanks to a timely intervention from one of the few Christian professors at his university. After his conversion, he vehemently renounced his former fascination with spiritualism, Satanism and other non-Christian beliefs. 

Business brought Longo to Pompeii, the legendary city of volcanic ruins, in 1872. Once there, he felt incredibly moved by the poverty and desperation of the common people. He retreated to a spot in the countryside, where he despaired at both the injustice surrounding him and his past associations with various belief systems. As he contemplated ending his life, Longo wrote of a revelation: “Then I heard an echo in my ear of the voice … repeating the words of the Blessed Virgin Mary: ‘One who propagates my Rosary shall be saved.’’”

In 1876, Longo announced plans to build a grand shrine to the Rosary, a Catholic devotion in which prayers are recited with beads while meditating on episodes from the lives of Jesus and Mary. Over the course of four decades, he built the Shrine of the Virgin of the Rosary in Pompeii by soliciting donations from all over the world. In 1885, he married a local countess, one of the financial supporters of the shrine.

The Catholic Church officially recognized Longo when he was beatified under Pope John Paul II in 1980, a formal declaration recognizing a deceased person as blessed and permitting public veneration. In 2025, church officials supported Longo's canonization for sainthood, citing the devotion he inspired and his charitable work.