St. Jerome Emiliani

St. Jerome Emiliani (1486–1537) was a Venetian soldier turned priest who became the great apostle of orphans and abandoned children in Renaissance Italy. Born Gerolamo Emiliani to a patrician family of Venice, he lost his father young and embraced a military career, living by his own later account a careless and worldly life. In 1511, while commanding the fortress of Castelnuovo for the Venetian Republic, he was captured and thrown into a dungeon in chains. In prison the proud soldier learned to pray. He escaped — a deliverance he attributed, according to tradition, to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary — and hung his chains at a Marian shrine at Treviso in thanksgiving. Profoundly changed, he began to study for the priesthood while managing the education of his orphaned nephews, and was ordained in 1518. The plague and famine that devastated northern Italy in the late 1520s revealed his true vocation: he sold his possessions to feed the starving, tended the sick at the risk of his life, and began gathering orphaned children, housing them, teaching them a trade, and instructing them in the faith — using, the accounts relate, a simple question-and-answer method that made him a pioneer of catechesis. He founded orphanages, hospitals, and homes for former prostitutes across the cities of northern Italy. In 1532, with two other priests, he established a community based at the village of Somasca, near Bergamo, devoted to the care of orphans and the poor; it became the Congregation of Regular Clerics, commonly called the Somaschi Fathers, which continues his work on several continents today. Having survived the plague once before, Jerome caught a fatal infection while nursing the sick, and died at Somasca on February 8, 1537. He was canonized in 1767 by Pope Clement XIII, and in 1928 Pope Pius XI declared him the universal patron of orphans and abandoned youth. His memorial is celebrated on February 8. His relics rest at the Sanctuary of San Girolamo in Somasca, a place of pilgrimage in the hills above Lake Como, where pilgrims still climb the path associated with his life of penance and charity.