Saint Fabiola

Saint Fabiola was a Roman patrician of the fourth century, a widow and a penitent who turned her fortune to the help of the poor and the sick. Almost everything we know about her comes from a letter that Saint Jerome wrote after her death. The Church commemorates her on December 27.

She came from the ancient family of the Fabii. The year of her birth is unknown. Her first husband led so dissolute a life that, as Jerome writes, the whole neighborhood talked of it. Fabiola divorced him under Roman law and, while still a very young woman, entered a second union during his lifetime. Jerome admits that this was a fault against the teaching of the Gospel, and adds that Fabiola did not realize it at the time.

After the death of her second husband she did something that moved all of Rome. She put on sackcloth and, in the Lateran basilica, stood in the ranks of the penitents, with her hair loose, before the bishop, the priests and the people, who wept with her. She did not enter the church until she was called back, and then, before the eyes of the whole community, she was restored to communion.

She never returned to her former life. She sold her property and gave the proceeds to the poor. According to Jerome, she was the first to found a hospital, where she gathered the sick taken in from the streets. In 1952 Pope Pius XII recalled that it was the first hospital in Rome. Fabiola herself carried the sick on her shoulders, washed wounds that others did not have the courage to look at, fed the patients with her own hand and gave drink to the dying. She also gave generously to the clergy and to communities of monks in Italy.

Around the year 395, against the advice of her friends, she sailed to the Holy Land and was the guest of Saint Jerome in Bethlehem. She read Sacred Scripture eagerly and asked questions which, as he himself admitted, he could not always answer. For her he wrote an explanation of the priestly vestments of Aaron. The treatise he had promised her on the halting places of Israel in the wilderness he finished only after her death and dedicated to her memory. When the invasion of the Huns threatened the East, Fabiola returned to Rome.

In her native city she lived from then on in poverty, in another person’s house, and distributed alms herself. Together with Saint Pammachius, a senator and a friend of Jerome, she founded at Portus, the harbor at the mouth of the Tiber, a house for strangers and poor travelers. Jerome wrote that news of this hospice quickly traveled the world, from Britain to Egypt and Parthia.

She died in Rome. The sources give the year 399 or 400. The whole city gathered for her funeral, psalms were sung, and the churches rang with the cry of Alleluia. Jerome honored her with a letter of praise addressed to Oceanus and ended it with the words of the Gospel that the one to whom more is forgiven loves more. Fabiola was never formally canonized, for she lived long before canonization processes existed. The Church venerates her as a saint, and the Roman Martyrology says of her that she turned her penance to the good of the poor.