Post #5921

SAINT PETER CELESTINE, POPE AND CONFESSOR Pietro Angelerio, called Celestive V by the name he took as Pope, was born from honest and Catholic parents in Isernia in Abruzzo (today in Molise) around 1209 and 1215, and was a man of very holy life. Just adolescent, in 1239, he retired in solitude in a cavern of Mount Morrone (Sulmona) to lead an ascetic life and to preserve the soul from the seductions of the world. There he nourished the spirit of contemplation, reduced the body to servitude, wore an iron chain on bare flesh. In 1240 he moved to Rome, where he studied and received the priestly orders. Leaving Rome, in 1241 he returned to Mount Morrone, in another cave, near the small church of Santa Maria di Segezzano. Five years later he also abandoned this cave to take refuge in an even more inaccessible place on the Majella mountains, in Abruzzo, where he lived in the simplest way possible.