Giovanni Antonio Guadagni - in religious Giovanni Antonio di San Bernardo - was an Italiancardinal and a professed member from the Discalced Carmelites. His rise in the ranks became rapid after his maternal uncle became Pope Clement XII and he was soon after made a cardinal who served in various positions within the Roman Curia. His beatification cause opened soon after his death but remained stalled until its resumption in 1940. The cause has since stalled once more.
Giovanni Antonio Guadagni was born in 1674 to a noble house in the Medici-ruled Florence as the second of four children to Donato Maria Guadagni and Maddalena Corsini ; his maternal uncle was Pope Clement XII. On the maternal side he was related to Saint Andrea Corsini. His siblings were : Tommaso, Neri Andrea, and Elisabetta. His father married twice more after Maddalena died: to Maria Maddalena Niccolini and Maria Alamanni, with whom he had four children. He received his doctorate in civil and canon law from the Pisan college on 3 May 1696. Guadagni later travelled to Rome to practice law but upon his return to Florence in 1697 after decided to become a priest. He entered the Order of Discalced Carmelites in Arezzo and assumed the religious name "Giovanni Antonio di San Bernardo" at the convent in Arezzo around 1669. He made his solemn profession of vows on 1 November 1700 and would undergo theological and philosophical studies in Florence at convents that the order managed. He was ordained to the priesthood on 11 March 1702 in Florence.
Episcopate
Guadagni was later named as the master of the novices and then as the provincial father for his order. It was at the request of the Grand Duke that he was promoted to the episcopate. Pope Benedict XIII appointed him as the Bishop of Arezzo on 20 December 1724 and he received his episcopal consecration a week later in the Santa Maria della Scala church from his uncle and future pope Lorenzo Corsini. But he first had to receive a special dispensation of his Carmelite vow not to accept ecclesial dignities in order to assume the ecclesial office. Guadagni was enthroned in his new see on 9 March 1725. In 1730 he affirmed opposition and his diocese's opposition to Jansenist heresies. His uncle's election as pope brought the bestowal of the pallium on Guadagni in the chapel of the Quirinal Palace on 22 November 1730. The pallium was normally only bestowed on metropolitan archbishops. In his uncle's pontificate, as a cardinal-nephew, he pursued the pope's pastoral and spiritual plans.
He died in Rome in 1759 and was buried at the left side of the main altar in Santa Maria della Scala in the tomb that he had constructed for himself. He also composed the inscription that was placed on the tomb. He became reputed for his holiness and was said to have been buried with the odor of saintliness.
Beatification process
The beatification process opened in Rome in 1763 in an informative process tasked with research into the late cardinal's life and his virtues and which closed in 1764. But the cause stalled at some point and remained dormant until it was reactivated under Pope Pius XII on 27 November 1940. But the cause stalled at a later point and remains so at present.
