St. Benedict Joseph Labre
Born: March 25, 1748
Died: April 16, 1783
Feast Day: April 16
Patron of: Homeless people
Cities are of many minds about their mentally ill homeless people. New York puts them up in slum hotels for $3000 a month. Phoenix passes laws to keep them off the sidewalks. In Washington, movie stars fast and sleep on the subway grates to champion their cause. In Chicago, a schizophrenic, homeless man once awoke on his park bench to find he had been set on fire. And in 1783, the city of Rome greeted the death of one of its homeless residents with the voices of children who ran through the streets shouting, “The saint is dead.” A hundred years later the Pope agreed; and Benedict Joseph Labre was canonized.
Born in 1748, Labre was the eldest of fifteen children of a prosperous French farmer. A pious young man, in his teen years Labre began reading the stern sermons of a sixteenth-century preacher whose fixations on penance, hell, and mortification became a torment to Benedict for nearly the rest of his life.
Labre sought the quiet of a Trappist monastery and tried to enter eleven in all. Each one dismissed him. His short stay at one monastery ended the night he woke up all the monks by dragging a huge cross through the dormitory in the middle of the night. “The monks recognized his piety, but they also recognized his craziness,” writes Father Benedict J. Groeschel in Stumbling Blocks or Stepping Stones.
Eventually Labre became a wanderer, moving from one shrine to another, rarely bathing or sleeping indoors. He wore rags and was infested with vermin, in time he carried a bell to warn people away from him. He made a habit of sharing his meager food with other beggars, and townspeople often saw through his rags to his piety. Mary Reed Newland’s The Saint Book describes mothers bringing their children to him for blessings and curses, a practice Benedict found uncomfortable.
After seven years on the road, Labre decided to stay in Rome for good. He took shelter in the Colosseum and in the backs of churches; he stood in convent food lines for bread. He often prayed eighteen hours a day. “The custodian of the church in Rome where he prayed testified during the process of beatification that he used to wait until the afternoon to sweep the corner of the church, because [Labre] would be elevated above the ground as he prayed,” writes Groeschel, who found in Roman janitors the height of nonchalance. (If you see someone smoking a cigarette at the last judgment, know that he is a janitor from a church in Rome,” he adds.)
During the last year of his life, Labre appeared to shake off the gloom that had always followed him. He confessed to being finally free of temptation, even the temptation to sorrow.
He became ill during Holy Week in 1783, and a barber took him in and put him to bed—the first bed he slept on in fourteen years. Papal soldiers were needed to control the crowds at his funeral. Everyone in Rome seemed to know him.
“Can a mentally ill person be a saint?” asks Groeschel. “God who is no psychologist will do what he will. Who is to say that God will not allow the great river of Divine Love to run through the soul and tormented mind of a mentally ill person?”
Who Indeed?
Image: Wikimedia Commons
