St. Cajetan

St. Cajetan was born in October 1480 at Vicenza in northern Italy, to the noble Thiene family, and is known in Italian as Gaetano. He earned a doctorate in civil and canon law at the University of Padua and entered the service of the Roman Curia under Pope Julius II, where he saw at close range both the machinery of the Church and the worldliness that afflicted it on the eve of the Reformation. Ordained a priest in 1516, he turned decisively from a promising career to a life of prayer and service. In Rome, Vicenza, and Venice, Cajetan joined and revitalized confraternities such as the Oratory of Divine Love, which united priests and laymen in prayer and in practical charity, especially the care of the incurably ill in hospitals that respectable society avoided. He became convinced that the reform the Church needed would come not from denunciation but from the holiness of her clergy. To that end, in 1524, with Gian Pietro Carafa, bishop of Chieti (in Latin, Theate) and later Pope Paul IV, Cajetan founded the Congregation of Clerks Regular, known from Carafa's see as the Theatines. Its priests took the traditional vows and bound themselves to live without property or fixed revenues, trusting entirely in God's providence for their daily needs while devoting themselves to preaching, the sacraments, and the sick. The Theatines became a seedbed of Catholic reform decades before the Council of Trent, and their radical trust in providence remains Cajetan's spiritual signature. When imperial troops sacked Rome in 1527, Cajetan was assaulted and the community fled to Venice; he later established the order in Naples, where he served the poor and, to rescue them from usurers, promoted charitable pawnshops (montes pietatis) from which the historic Bank of Naples traced its origin. Worn out by his labors and grieved by strife in the city, he died in Naples on August 7, 1547, and is buried in the basilica of San Paolo Maggiore there. He was canonized in 1671 by Pope Clement X. Because of his boundless confidence in God's providence, he is invoked as patron of the unemployed, of workers and job seekers, and of gamblers seeking to reform; his feast is August 7.