Domenico Berni

Domenico Berni Leonardi was born on 26 May 1940 at Piane di Carniglia, a hamlet in the municipality of Bedonia in the province of Parma, in the Diocese of Piacenza, northern Italy. He entered the Order of Saint Augustine and was ordained a priest of the order on 29 June 1966.

In 1971, five years after his ordination, Berni travelled to Peru to serve in the Territorial Prelature of Chuquibambilla in the Apurimac region of the southern Andes. Pope Paul VI had erected the prelature only a few years earlier and entrusted it to the Augustinians of Italy.

For fifteen years he was parish priest of Antabamba, also serving the communities of Grau and Cotabambas. According to Il Nuovo Giornale of Piacenza, for more than 25 years he visited parishes across the mountains on horseback because there were so few roads.

On 29 March 1989 Pope John Paul II named him Prelate of Chuquibambilla. He asked to receive episcopal ordination in the Basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro in Pavia, which holds the relics of Saint Augustine, and was ordained bishop there on 10 September 1989 by the apostolic nuncio to Peru, Luigi Dossena, with Antonio Giuseppe Angioni and Giovanni Volta as co-consecrators.

As bishop he promoted the integral development of rural communities through Caritas, including a programme that distributed seeds and vegetables to women so that children could have a better diet. Pope Francis accepted his resignation on 24 April 2018, shortly before his 78th birthday, and he was succeeded by Edinson Edgardo Farfan Cordova.

As an Augustinian, Berni sought to live in community and kept a small vegetable garden. He was known for his simple way of life and liked to say that people could live happily in simplicity, seeing others smile even when they had nothing.

He was a long-standing friend of his fellow Augustinian Robert Prevost, later Pope Leo XIV, whom he came to know through the Peruvian mission. Prevost visited the Augustinian missions in the Andes as prior general of the order, travelled to Apurimac as a bishop in 2018 to bid Berni farewell, and later visited him in Liguria as prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops. Berni went to Rome when Prevost was made a cardinal, and in November 2025 he visited Pope Leo XIV at the Apostolic Palace.

Domenico Berni died on Sunday 8 November 2026 at the Augustinian community house in Genoa, Italy, aged 86. The cause of death was not made public. His death was reported by Vatican News, EWTN News and Il Nuovo Giornale.

The current Prelate of Chuquibambilla, Wilder Alberto Vasquez Saldana, invited the faithful to a Mass for him in the Cathedral of the Senor de la Exaltacion in Chuquibambilla. The bishops of Peru thanked God for his 47 years of missionary dedication in the country, especially in Apurimac. He was the third bishop who had served in Peru to die in a matter of days, shortly before Pope Leo XIV was due to arrive in the country.

Berni is remembered in Apurimac as a missionary bishop who spent almost half a century among the farming communities of the high Andes, leaving a lasting mark of service and evangelisation in the Prelature of Chuquibambilla. In 2019 he received the Antonino d'Oro award in Piacenza in recognition of his work, and his friendship with Pope Leo XIV brought renewed attention to the Augustinian mission in Peru.