Saint Felix of Cantalice

Saint Felix of Cantalice was a Capuchin, a religious brother who for forty years walked the streets of Rome begging alms for his fellow friars and for the poor. He greeted everyone with the words “Deo gratias,” that is, “Thanks be to God,” and so the city called him Brother Deo Gratias. The Church commemorates him on May 18.

He was born most probably in 1515 at Cantalice near Rieti, into a poor peasant family. As a boy he went to nearby Cittaducale, where he served the Picchi family, first as a shepherd and then working in the fields. He never learned to read. Around the turn of 1543 and 1544 he entered the Capuchins. He made his novitiate at Fiuggi, and in 1545 he professed his religious vows in the friary at Monte San Giovanni Campano.

After a little more than two years in the friaries of Tivoli and Viterbo, his superiors sent him in 1547 to Rome, to the friary of Saint Bonaventure at the foot of the Quirinal. There he served as alms collector for the rest of his life. With a sack on his shoulder he went from house to house gathering gifts for his brothers, and from what he received he also fed the poor. He called himself “the Capuchins’ donkey.” At night he prayed for long hours in the church and slept only two or three hours.

In the streets of Rome he visited the sick and helped the poor. He spoke in the same way with simple people and with civil and ecclesiastical dignitaries, who sought his company and asked his advice. He was a friend of Saint Philip Neri and of Pope Sixtus V. Children were especially drawn to him: he gathered them in the squares and taught them the truths of the faith through simple songs, some of which he composed himself.

He had an ardent devotion to the Mother of God. According to tradition, Mary appeared to him and placed the Child Jesus in his arms, and so paintings usually show him holding the Child. He died in Rome on May 18, 1587. Crowds came to the friary, and Sixtus V at once ordered that testimonies about his life be gathered. His body rests in the Capuchin church of the Immaculate Conception on Via Veneto.

Pope Urban VIII declared him blessed on October 1, 1625, and Clement XI canonized him on May 22, 1712. He was the first Capuchin to be numbered among the saints. His name is borne by the Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Felix of Cantalice, the Felician Sisters, founded in Warsaw in 1855 by Blessed Mary Angela Truszkowska. John Paul II recalled that the foundress used to bring children to the Capuchin church in Warsaw and prayed there before the image of the saint with the Child, seeing in him a model of service to the little ones.