By RAY CAVANAUGH
In his day, Benedict Joseph Labre was considered too eccentric to gain admission to any religious order. He is now a patron saint of beggars, the homeless, and the rejected. April 16 is his feast day.
The eldest of 15 children in a well-to-do merchant family, Labre was born on March 25, 1748, in northern France. He is described as a quiet, contemplative youth with an amiable disposition but also a touch of sadness.
His parents, who wanted at least one of their sons to become a clergyman, supported his early ecclesiastic ambitions. As a teenager, he moved to live with his uncle, a parish priest, who educated him in Latin and the Scripture.
When he wasn’t studying, he roamed around the area, where the indigent “had a strange attraction for him; they were pure nature, without much of the convention that he so disliked, and he was often with them, and regularly emptied his pockets among them,” according to Alban Goodier’s book Saints for Sinners.
When Labre was 18 years old, an epidemic came to the region. He and his uncle bravely administered to the region’s afflicted — a decision which cost the uncle his life, and left Labre without a place to be.
He tried to join La Trappe Abbey in Orne, France, but was rejected. He then briefly lived with a distant relative, before trying to join a Carthusian monastery, where the monks told him that he wasn’t fit for their order.
Another Carthusian monastery agreed to give him a trial. But it didn’t last long, as he was beginning to feel confined. The monks, who could see that he wasn’t adapting well, dismissed him. Yet another trial, this time at the Cistercian Abbey of Sept-Fonts, ended once again in disappointment.
Though he sometimes wrote letters to his parents, Labre had resolved never to return home. Seeing that he couldn’t be a monk like the others, he chose to “be one after his own manner,” according to Goodier, who adds that since Labre “could not live in the confinement of a monastery, then the whole world should be his cloister.”
And so he embarked on his grand pilgrimage, wearing a long cloak with a rope around his waist and rosary beads around his neck. All his other belongings were contained within a sack. He slept either in fields or in whatever shelter he came across. For food, he either foraged on the roadside or ate what others gave him.
While in northern Italy, he sent a letter to his parents dated August 31, 1770. The letter reads: “Do not make yourselves uneasy on my account. . . . I am very happy in having undertaken my present journey.” This is the last-known contact he had with his family.
Though Labre reported that he was enjoying his ongoing journey, the wandering life presented its dangers. Not every traveler was a spiritual pilgrim, and some were fugitive criminals or otherwise dangerous people.
Additionally, “prisoners were sometimes arrested on the roads, and sent to the nearest beggars’ prison,” according to Agnes De La Gorce’s biography Saint Benedict Joseph Labre, which adds that he was “the type of man who always fell under police suspicion, the tramp constantly stopped with hostile requests to show his passport, often forced to spend nights in prison.”
Upon reaching Rome, Labre visited the holy landmarks and then somewhat disappeared into the streets. At that time, Rome had a large number of street people, and many of them would seek shelter, among other things, inside the Colosseum. According to De La Gorce, “At nightfall, its dark crevices were scenes for the lovemaking of the poorest, for the secret plotting of thieves.” Amidst such activities, Labre would take to his knees and pray continuously, as night passed over the Colosseum.
After about nine months in Rome, he once again went on the road. Over the course of these travels, he visited shrines in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland, before returning to “settle” in Rome.
It seemed his favorite church in Rome was Santa Maria dei Monti, where he attended Mass most mornings. He was well-known in the neighborhood as a harmless, quiet misfit.
A priest who knew him said that Labre had a “strange radiance about him.” The priest also noticed his increasingly frail appearance.
By April 1783, Labre was sickly and chronically exhausted. On Wednesday in Holy Week, shortly after noontime, he collapsed on the steps of his favorite church. He was too weak to get back on his feet. A local man who knew Labre had him brought to his house, where the wanderer, then age 35, quickly died.
Within the community, Labre’s death “stirred a kind of universal commotion,” says Saints for Sinners. Rumors circulated that “there is a saint dead in Rome.” The excitement was instantaneous and almost constituted a miracle in itself.
Labre, who died emaciated and covered in sores, was now having churches in Rome fight over who would have the honor of interring his corpse. His funeral was held in Santa Maria dei Monti. The crowds of attendees were so massive that soldiers had to make room for the procession.
Crowds kept coming to the church, which had to close down for a few days in an effort to end the commotion. But as soon as the church reopened, the crowds reappeared and remained for about two months. Labre was buried beneath an altar in Santa Maria dei Monti, which now has a marble sculpture of him.
Within less than two years, newspapers in London were mentioning purported miracles that’d been attributed to Labre. At least one incidence of a “miraculous multiplication of food for the poor” was attributed to him, according Michael Freze’s book Patron Saints.
The legacy of Labre, who was canonized in 1881, endures in the United States: the New York City borough of Queens has the St. Benedict Joseph Labre Church; Fort Worth, Texas, has the Labre Society, a nondenominational volunteer organization which provides essential items to the area’s homeless; and Cleveland, Ohio, has The St. Benedict Joseph Labre Ministry to the Homeless.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress