Bruno Lanteri wanted to be a Carthusian and was turned away for poor health, which decided the shape of his life: he spent it among people the Church of his time was frightening rather than helping. Piedmont was deep in Jansenism, and its effect on ordinary consciences was to make absolution feel unearnable and Communion a thing for the nearly perfect. Lanteri, taught by the former Jesuit Nicolas von Diessbach and reading Alphonsus Liguori, set himself against it.
What he gave people was a sentence and a method. The sentence is <em>Nunc coepi</em> — now I begin — which he took from the Psalms and taught as the right response to falling, not once but every time, without the self-disgust that Jansenism mistook for humility. Begin again, he said, and if you fall a thousand times a day, begin a thousand times. It is the reason he is read now.
He smuggled forbidden books, kept a network distributing Liguori and sound moral theology, and was put under house arrest by Napoleon's administration from 1811 to 1814 for corresponding with the imprisoned Pius VII. In those years, his witnesses said, he prayed as he had never had time to before. He founded the Oblates of the Virgin Mary to carry on the work, saw the congregation nearly destroyed and refounded, and died at Pinerolo on 5 August 1830. Paul VI declared him Venerable in 1965.