Saint Homobonus of Cremona

Saint Homobonus of Cremona was a cloth merchant, a husband, and the father of a family, who put the wealth he had earned in trade at the service of the poor. Pope Innocent III enrolled him among the saints as early as 1199, little more than a year after his death. The Church commemorates him on November 13.

He was born in Cremona, in Lombardy, in the first half of the twelfth century. The year of his birth is not known; the year 1117, sometimes given, rests only on the report that he lived about eighty years. The name Homobonus, in Italian Omobono, means “good man.” Tradition links him with the merchant family of the Tucenghi. He lived near the Church of Saint Giles and, like his father, worked as a tailor and traded in cloth.

He married and had children. For decades he ran his business honestly and successfully. The oldest lives relate that in his mature years he underwent a deep conversion: he withdrew from trade and took up the life of a penitent. He did not enter a religious order; he remained a layman in his own home. From then on he divided his time among prayer, fasting, and service to those in need.

His contemporaries called him the father of the poor. He turned his home into a place of welcome for the poor and for pilgrims, gave alms generously, and himself buried the abandoned dead. The Roman Martyrology recalls that he gathered and educated abandoned children. Not everyone approved of his choices: as John Paul II wrote, his wife did not share them, his parish looked with suspicion on his austerity, and dishonest merchants tried to cheat him.

Cremona at that time was a city torn by disputes between factions and families. Homobonus reconciled those at odds, and the bull of canonization calls him a man of peace. He also held fast to the faith of the Church at a time when heresies were spreading in Lombardy. Every day he took part in Holy Mass in the Church of Saint Giles and prayed there for a long time before the cross. From that prayer, as John Paul II observed, he learned to treat life as a gift.

There too he died, on November 13, 1197. Early in the morning, at the beginning of Mass, while the Gloria was being sung, he sank to the ground before the cross at which he had been kneeling. As it was reported, those present thought he was absorbed in prayer; only when he did not rise for the Gospel did they realize that he was dead. News of this death quickly spread through the city, and at his tomb, as witnesses attested, miracles took place. Sicard, the bishop of Cremona, went to Rome with the parish priest Osbert and a group of townspeople to ask the pope to recognize his holiness.

Innocent III declared him a saint on January 12, 1199, with the bull Quia pietas. As John Paul II recalled, Homobonus is the only layman canonized in the Middle Ages who came neither from the nobility nor from a ruling family. Probably as early as 1202 his body was moved to the cathedral of Cremona, where it rests to this day in the crypt. In 1643 the city council chose him as the patron of the city. He is also venerated as the patron of merchants, tailors, and cloth workers.