Saint Benedict Joseph Labre

Saint Benedict Joseph Labre was a French pilgrim and penitent. He was unable to remain in any of the monasteries he entered, so as a layman he traveled on foot to the shrines of Europe and spent his last years in Rome among the poor, living on alms and praying in the churches. The Church commemorates him on April 16.

He was born on March 26, 1748, in Amettes in northern France, the eldest of fifteen children. When he was twelve, his parents sent him to study with his paternal uncle, the parish priest of Érin. There he learned Latin, but he was less and less drawn to any knowledge that did not lead directly to God. In 1766 his uncle died during an epidemic in which the two of them had been nursing the sick, and Benedict returned to his parents.

He wanted to enter the strictest order he knew. The Trappists at La Trappe told him he was too young. He spent six weeks with the Carthusians at Neuville, and in November 1769 he was admitted to the Cistercian abbey of Sept-Fons. There, however, his health gave way, and it was judged that his vocation lay elsewhere. In 1770 he set out on foot for Rome. From Piedmont he wrote his parents a letter, the last they ever received from him.

On the way he understood that the road was to be his monastery. He resolved, after the example of Saint Alexius, to leave his homeland and live in penance in the midst of the world, going on pilgrimage to holy places, and he submitted this plan to his confessors. For several years he walked from shrine to shrine: he was in Loreto, Assisi, and Bari, in Einsiedeln in Switzerland, and in Santiago de Compostela. He wore an old, ragged cloak, a rosary around his neck, and a cross on his breast, and in his sack he carried the New Testament, a breviary, and The Imitation of Christ. He usually slept in the open air. As a rule he did not ask for alms; he lived on what he was given and passed on whatever was left over to other poor people.

He spent the last six years of his life in Rome, leaving once a year on pilgrimage to Loreto. He slept at night in the ruins of the Colosseum and spent his days in the churches. He was seen so often wherever the Forty Hours devotion before the Blessed Sacrament was being held that the Romans called him the poor man of the Forty Hours.

On Wednesday of Holy Week, April 16, 1783, he collapsed on the steps of the church of Santa Maria ai Monti. A butcher who lived nearby took him into his house, and there Benedict died that evening. Children cried out in the streets, “The saint is dead!” He was buried in the church of Santa Maria ai Monti, and his confessor, Father Marconi, soon wrote an account of his life.

Pope Pius IX beatified him on May 20, 1860, and Leo XIII canonized him on December 8, 1881. The faithful venerate him as the patron of the homeless and of pilgrims. Benedict XVI, who was born and baptized on April 16, called him on his eighty-fifth birthday one of the most unusual saints in the history of the Church. He said that this begging pilgrim shows that God alone suffices.