Giuseppe Cataldo was born in Terrasini, Sicily, on March 17, 1837, the eldest child of his buona borghesia parents, Antonio Cataldo and Sebastiana Borruso. He was naturally frail and not expected to survive. The family doctor even mistook him for dead at one point in his second year, his tiny coffin laying at the ready. Yet thirteen birthdays later there he was still, December 22, 1852, requesting admittance to Casa Professa, the Jesuit Novitiate in nearby Palermo. The intervening years had not been easy ones. In addition to chronic weak health, political unrest also forced multiple family relocation between Terrasini and his mother's home village of Castellammare del Golfo twenty miles away to the west.
