Father Giovanni Salerno was born in Gela, Sicily on January 30, 1938. In 1954, he finished high school at the school of the Augustinian priests in Palermo and then went on to San Gimignano to begin his novitiate in the Augustinian Order. From 1957 to 1961 he studied Theology in the archdiocesan seminary of Monreale in Palermo and was ordained a priest on December 23, 1961.  Already nourishing from childhood the strong desire to serve the poor of the Third World, he asked permission of his superiors to apply for missionary medical studies.
In August 1968, Father Giovanni left with a group of Augustinians in order to found a prelacy in the Andean region of Apurimac, Peru. In this missionary land he confronted a truly alarming situation: entire villages that still lived in the stone age, completely abandoned. Seeing such a sad situation, he began to found medical dispensaries in the main villages of the region and, in the city of Abancay, he founded a leprosarium in order to heal those with Hansen’s disease.
From the beginning, Father Giovanni Salerno was aware that the poor villages of the Andean Mountains of Peru not only needed missionary priests, but physicians and other laypeople willing to consecrate their service, also.

Hence, in the eighties he founded a profoundly ecclesial Movement, The Missionary Servants of the Poor of the Third World (Opus Christi Salvatoris Mundi) which invites young people, married couples, priests and laypeople to join in aiding our many brothers who suffer in the Third World.