Friday, March 10, 2006

The Patron Saint Of Handgunners...

Saint Gabriel Possenti is officially known as Saint Gabriel of the Sorrowful Mother and is the official Catholic patron of youth, seminarians, clerics, and the Abruzzi region of Italy.

Gabriel Possenti was born in the well-known town of Assisi, Italy, on March 1, 1838.

In 1959, Pope John XXIII named him the patron of the Abruzzi region, where he spent the last two years of his earthly life. His shrine at Gran Sasso is one of the more popular ones in Europe.

His unofficial adoption as the patron saint of handgunners and marksmen is based upon documented events in which Friar Possenti stepped in when a pair of highwaymen were in the process of robbing some folks on a back road (or by some accounts terrorizing the residents of the town of Isola).

Friar Possenti approached the thugs and ordered them to leave. When they refused he drew a pair of pistols (most accounts say "revolvers" but given the 1859 date of the event, it was more likely they were flintlock or percussion single shot pistols) from beneath his tunic. They laughed at him, saying something to the effect of "...those are useless-- what would a priest know of hitting anything with a pistol..." and they advanced to attack him and the others.

Friar Possenti took aim at a lizard across the road, and cut it in half with a well placed shot. Friar Possenti pointed out that he still had another shot in his other pistol, and asked which of the goblins wished to receive it first--whereupon, the they decided that they had more important business elsewhere and departed to live another day.

Now, Catholics are the only folks to have Saints, as we know Saints to be, and while it's amusing to hear from other religious denominations about how one Saint or another should be called the Patron of Handguns, it is, after all, for the Catholics to decide.

And they have. Gabriel Possenti has long been Italy's underground patron Saint of the gun, and such a man is referred to as a pezzonovante. In Italian, it translates to .45 caliber, and was once used to denote a man of great stature or prowess. The phrase was bastardized by immigrants arriving in NYC, poorly translated to mean "big-shot", but most Italians know what it really means.

Therefore, in the proper spirit of the term, we salute Saint Gabriel Possenti as a true Pezzonovante, and who better to have on your side than a Saint who's handy with a .45.

Bravo, signore.

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