BeNEDiCt LaBRE: saint by acclamation,              Part 1          Part 2
by Paul Hourihan

[The following is the second of two articles on the intriguing lives of two unusual Catholic saints. The first was: Catherine of Genoa: Saint of Love.]

On the eve of the French Revolution Europe was swarming with beggars—thousands and thousands of them. All except Benedict Labre (1748 – 1783) are forgotten.

Few men have been able to live as he did, with such severity, and with that simple single-mindedness and terrifying logic which—as much as their radiance—is one of the hallmarks of the saint. But some have been able to: there have always been hermits, beggars and ascetics of all kinds among the men of God. So in fairness it may be said that nothing in Benedict Labre's life up to the moment of his death at thirty-five, in Rome, was really unique or original. It was what happened after his death that marks him out and presents his story for our edification, and wonder.

He was born in 1748, the oldest of what were to be fifteen children, in a small Catholic village, strong in its piety, dotted with shrines, in the northwestern part of France. Both his parents were religious people and each had brothers and uncles in the clergy. As Benedict's father was a fairly successful farmer, they were able to give him a good education.

At the age of twelve Benedict was handed over to an uncle who was the parish priest in the neighboring village, to live and study with him until he was eighteen. According to the plan, Benedict was then supposed to follow his uncle’s calling, since even as a boy he had shown signs of an inborn religious tendency beyond the average; and, also, it was his father's hope that at least one of his sons should become a secular, parish priest, working and living among the people.

But during the six years with his uncle, Benedict came to believe that he could be of more service, both to himself and to the world, as a contemplative monk than as a parish priest. He had always been a withdrawn, lonely boy; cheerful but meditative; loving and considerate of others, but haunted by the thought of God, the Passion of Christ, and the waywardness of men—a youth unable to respond to life the way other people did, or value the things they valued; the very image of the young man set apart from the life around him, forever looking on, unable to take part in the activity of the world according to the accepted tradition. More significantly, even as a boy he was always checking himself, driven even then by an inner urge to strip himself of everything that was superficial.

When Benedict was eighteen he came home to his parents and soon made known to them what his deepest wishes were: to join the strictest monastery he could find, preferably the Trappists, for he believed that among men leading austere, self-abnegating lives consecrated to God, he would obtain the spiritual peace which until then had eluded him. There followed the first of many struggles between Benedict's longing for a contemplative life and his parents’ dismayed and stubborn opposition to it.

For the next three years Benedict made one attempt after another to get himself admitted into Carthusian or Trappist monasteries. For some he was not strong enough, or not old enough, or not qualified; in one or two he manifested such spiritual turmoil even after being accepted that they quietly asked him to leave. And each time his parents renewed their opposition to his course, arguing that it was clearly not the will of God that he should pursue it any longer. Still, he persisted and finally, in 1769, when he was twenty-one he told them he was leaving them for good, and that, come what may, he would continue seeking access to monasteries in France, or even Italy.

But he would not leave until they consented. There is much evidence that he loved his parents. In two letters that he wrote them during the first months of his wanderings—the only two he ever sent—a deep filial love and respect is apparent, and an anguished desire not to hurt them any more than necessary. When at last they yielded to his wishes and gave him their blessing, he left them, never to return, never to see them again. Except for the two letters he sent in the year following, while he was still within the borders of France, they lost all track of him.

In 1770 he lived eight unhappy months in a Cistercian monastery in southern France. The confinement depressed him, and even in this silent and austere place he found that he could not renounce enough, could not denude himself enough, could not sufficiently express his complete dependence on God. In addition, here he passed through the most serious spiritual crisis of his life up to that time and, as a consequence, his health broke down. At the end of the eight months' trial his brother monks, fearing perhaps for his sanity, suggested that he leave.

Benedict Labre was twenty-two when he left France, a lonely, disoriented, homeless youth, directing his steps hopefully now to Italy, to the shrines, the holy places... perhaps a community of hermits somewhere, or even in another monastery in Italy. The second letter he sent home to his parents, around this time, suggests that he still thought of the monastic life as his goal. But soon afterward there must have been some great spiritual experience, or a series of experiences, that changed his view radically. Some terrible or glorious vision had given him his vocation at last ... to be an eternal pilgrim on all the high roads of Central Europe, wandering in a profound obscurity and nameless isolation; a self-despising and self-annihilating beggar who would welcome the contempt, hunger, privation, loneliness, ignominy, and live in the world as an all-renouncing monk—with the whole world as his cloister.

For the next seven years, with Rome as his starting-point, he wandered over Italy, Germany, Switzerland, south France and Spain, visiting the chief shrines, dressed in rags, broken shoes on his feet, sleeping under the sky, an old sack slung over his shoulder in which he carried a few devotional books and the dust collected at the graves of saints. He was seen everywhere, and yet not seen. He never gave his name, background or associations. He traveled alone, with God as his only companion. He lived on alms for which he did not beg, and when there was none forthcoming he ate wild berries and fruit. If anyone gave him more than he needed for that day he passed it on to some other beggar.

A kind of agony at the thought of God had possessed him, a sense of God inhabiting and consuming him, ruining his flesh, flogging him endlessly across all the roads and mountain passes of Europe; an all-devouring and insatiable hunger to become more and more a part of the Eternal One.

For the next, and last six years of his life he settled in Rome, by day visiting churches all over the city, by night sleeping in a dark corner among the ruins of the Coliseum. Soon people were calling him “the beggar of the Coliseum.” Some of those who knew him then said that he seemed to go weeks and months at a time without speaking. But he was known all the same, observed everywhere, and by eyes which out of scorn or fear avoided him, or out of shame. And there were times when many heard his voice, speaking the simplest words whose effect was always extraordinary on those who heard them—all agreed to that.

His confessor, an obscure priest in Rome, also found him extraordinary. After Benedict had made one or two visits to his church this priest began to take down notes of the things he said and of his own impressions of this strange, silent man who, as time went on, began to speak of the Trinity and the Godhead in the confessional box with a directness and passion that dumbfounded the priest, but who, when asked for his background and education, answered that he was only a poor ignorant beggar who knew nothing.

A popular artist of the day named Cavallucci, painted him as he was praying in one of the Roman churches. The painting, which now hangs in the National Gallery at Rome, is a marvelous work. Benedict's arms are crossed in front of him, in reverent recollection; he wears a habit-like garment, worn, dusty and old. A large, heavy rosary hangs around his neck. His eyes are gently closed, he is lost in prayer. It is the face of silence, the face of a man who has seen God. Nothing, one senses, can frighten this man. Nothing on earth can allure him. He wants nothing. Whatever he has sought in life, he has found—and has become that which he found. There is a peace on his face that is dazing and unutterable. As one gazes at the picture, awe at what must have been his life flows into one's heart....     

Part 2

For several weeks prior to his death his confessor entreated Benedict to take better care of himself, for the failing state of his health was clearly evident now. At least he ought to tend to the sores and ulcers that were appearing on his body. Benedict did not listen to him. Any kind of consideration for his body, his mortal existence, at this stage of his life was the farthest thing from his mind. One morning after Mass, on the steps of a little church he had come to frequent most during his last period in Rome, the Church of the Madonna dei Monti, Benedict fainted from malnutrition and disease—and longing for God. A neighborhood butcher who knew him only slightly, it seems, begged him to come to his house and rest there. Benedict agreed.

That same day Benedict Labre died in the man's house, an unknown beggar, obscure, silent, penniless, his flesh wasted; in a back street in Rome, at the age of thirty-five.

That was when it happened.

Even from this distance it takes one's breath away to contemplate it. No one knows just how it started, or when, but all at once the event was being broadcast in the neighborhood, then in other neighborhoods and, swiftly, throughout the city. Everybody seemed to become aware of his death at the same time. Suddenly, with one accord, the children of the neighborhood were parading through the streets, shouting in unison, over and over again: “The Saint is dead! ... The Saint is dead!... E morto el Santo!...” and all at once thousands of people all over Rome, as if communicating silently and mysteriously with each other, conspired to work a mass miracle as great and inexplicable as Benedict's life had been and in the process to redeem themselves, to absolve their lives of the scorn, the abuse and the indifference they had shown him when he lived. Suddenly everybody in Rome seemed to remember him and now it was as if nobody who had ever seen him, much less spoken to him or lived near him, had ever forgotten him. They all remembered now, and each tried to outdo the other in how much he remembered. All seemed compelled to share in this common cause, this passionate and instantaneous movement whose motivation was the recognition of the divine in humanity and the ability of all to recognize that divinity, not to let it die but to hail it, to worship it, and so enshrine it in their own heritage.

He lay on view for four days in the Church of the Madonna dei Monti. Hundreds, then thousands and more thousands of people from every corner of the great city came, even as the fever mounted, the burning, swelling mass urge to do homage to Benedict Labre, the beggar, suddenly dead. And the same cry, again and again, rose in intensity: “The Saint is dead....A Saint is dead in Rome...” the press of numbers was so great around the church that troops were summoned to preserve order. Even after he was buried, within the little church itself, on Easter Sunday afternoon, the throngs kept coming endlessly. As a countermeasure the church was closed, then reopened a few days later, and once again great Roman throngs of exalted people poured into the church to be near him even in death and they continued coming that way for two and a half more months. Even Rome had never witnessed anything like it.

From Rome, in a matter of days, the news spread like wildfire throughout Italy, and beyond Italy, across all the roads and passes where he had trudged his way during the long years of pilgrimage. In towns, hamlets, shrines, mountain villages all over Catholic Europe and it seemed that everyone recalled him, that no one had forgotten him. Overnight the legend grew and formed, and this in a day of slow communication. Miracles, false and genuine, were reported; hundreds of stories were told; soon his name was known from one end of Europe to the other; and on lips everywhere the same words were heard: “A Saint is dead in Rome....”

And the beggars of Rome, who had seen him so often, who had watched him as he prayed and read his books of devotion, who had mocked and insulted him and gloated on the thought that here was one whom they could look down on—they, too, remembered. Once for a few weeks during a period of sickness he had stayed with them in a public lodging-house and, after the mockery and abuse were over, they remembered how he had changed them all in those few weeks—gradually, wordlessly; how at the end they had chanted the Te Deum and prayed with him; how he had lifted them all up in spite of themselves, done something to their lives so that they could never be the same again. Even these beggars had their day of glory now. They, also, would not be excluded from the vast ground-swell of desire to honor this man who only a short time before had passed among them, moving in a field of holiness, like a presence, like a memory... strangely like the image of another Man of whom, they now realize, Benedict Labre had always reminded them.

A year and a half after his death, the London papers were discussing his career and sanctity, as well as the miracles. In 1784, the year after his death, his Roman confessor, Marconi, wrote and published his life story; written, he states in the preface, because so many conflicting tales were being circulated about him. In 1785 an abridged translation of this work was published in London. And he was canonized a saint by the pope exactly one hundred years after he collapsed that day on the steps of the little church, in the bright sunlight. But long before that he had been canonized in the truest sense—by the will of the people, the acclamation of his own contemporaries, and the mercy of the God who lives forever in the hearts of everyone.

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