The word of God says: look to the rock from which you were cut. For the people of God in the Old Testament it was Abraham, for all the people of God the rock is Jesus together with his saints: for us in particular St. Jerome Miani.
If we ask ourselves to which current of spirituality St. Jerome Emiliani belongs, it would be difficult to give a definite answer. To him we associate other saints of the Renaissance such as St. Gaetano Thiene, St. Anthony M. Zaccaria, St. Ignatius of Loyola, directly or indirectly related to each other.
We can only say that in the spirituality of our Saint several components converge.
- Marian spirituality
First of all, there is his military experience and his conversion to Mary: Jerome felt saved and liberated by Mary.
The devotion to Mary, as reflected in the story of his conversion and in the letters of St. Jerome, Mary frees you from your chains and takes you by the hand through the difficult passages of life.
Two Marian phrases from the Gospel return with insistence in an extraordinary number of variations in the letters of St. Jerome. The first is the phrase of Magnificat: “God has done great things in me.” In the second letter this expression returns hammer and tongs. In weakness and trial, God’s greatness, his doing, is revealed. In fact, God works his things in those who live by faith and hope, fills them with charity, he does great things in them. So God did with all the saints; so with the people of Israel; so He does with the good servant who hopes in Him and stands firm in tribulation, stands strong in the way of God. “It has been certified to you by me and others that God will likewise do the same for you, if you remain strong in faith.”
The second Marian phrase that returns in the writings is the Virgin’s phrase at Cana: Do whatever Jesus tells you. It is a way of doing that is filtered in the light of God’s will: the Lord shows, Christ inspires, he alone knows, he shows the remedy, and the measure: a way of doing that is filtered also through prayer, the fire of the spirit, which gives us the ability to understand his holy will in these tribulations of ours and to carry it out. Even in the unforeseen daily situation, we must pray and say what the Lord suggests to us, pray to see what we must do in deeds and words, so that the Lord may glorify Himself in us through me. A doing that is grace, grace to operate; a grace to ask with humility to the Lord: so much pray and pray, that we see and, seeing, operate what in this precise moment is necessary.
Finally, Mary is the full of grace and the mother of all graces: Mary is the source of our joy because of her humility (Father), her virginity (Son), her charity (Spirit), because she has Jesus in her heart, in her womb, and she gives him to the world, because with the Risen Jesus, she is the source of our hope and resurrection, and she is our advocate.
- The Devotio Moderna
Jerome’s Christian sensibility was also influenced by the Devotio Moderna, a movement of spirituality that arose in the 14th century in the Netherlands and was lived in particular by the Brothers of the Common Life, a group of lay people who lived together and sought to sanctify themselves by practicing works of charity. Their method was based on meditation on the Passion of Jesus and on the “exercitia spiritualia” to control one’s own passions, to be more available to the needs of one’s neighbor with greater agility in good works. Imitating Christ in his life, without the qualms of a heavy legalism, reading the Bible, and in particular St. Paul, a powerful personality struggling with himself in order to conform to the Cross of Jesus, are characteristics of this movement, which, made its own by the Benedictines and the Lateran Canons, spread throughout Europe and had its code in the golden booklet of the Imitation of Christ. Almost all the saints of the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation read it and recommended it: it is written in a medieval Latin, rhythmic and rich in parallelisms, easy to understand. It has had so many editions.
The account of the conversion and asceticism of Jerome Miani by his friend Anonymous and the contents of the Lettera Esortatoria by Paolo Veronese to Jerome Miani, belong to the spiritual climate of the Devotio Moderna, in which we must probably see a homonymous ancestor, who lived in the fifteenth century, of our saint: a family codex, which our founder had in his hands and which proposes a whole series of spiritual exercises to be carried out in order to achieve conversion and perfect conformity to Christ. Jerome Miani breathes in this ascetic atmosphere proposed by the Devotio Moderna. In his communities and in the heart of each one, spiritual devotion must reign, an atmosphere of fervor, built on the imitation of Christ, on an intense assimilation to Jesus Crucified, on a strong commitment to asceticism and mortification (purifying way), on the search for friendships and Christian readings (enlightening way), on prayer and the sacraments (unitive way).
- Evangelism
Another spiritual attitude that has influenced the religious sensibility of Jerome is Evangelism, a movement of intense spiritual life that is found in the period of late humanism and early Renaissance, particularly in Venice, and has as its characteristic study of the Bible, even in its original Greek and Hebrew texts, and is accompanied by considerable austerity of customs. Its promoter and model is the Blessed Paolo Giustiniani, who is in the circle of Jerome’s friends. He, with other intellectuals, had founded in Venice a group of reformers and scholars of the sacred texts. But the pragmatic aspect of Evangelism, to reform the Church and bring it back to the sanctity of the apostolic times, is made its own by the Oratory of the Divine Love to which belong St. Gaetano and St. Jerome, who tries to found himself evangelical communities on the model of the primitive church inside the hospitals with his putti and the Servants of the poor, and by the Oratory of the Divine Wisdom, which adheres in Milan St. Anthony M. Zaccaria. In all the Saints of this pre-Tridentine period there is the fervent desire and the cultural and charitable commitment for the reform of the Church and the return to the holiness of the apostolic times, to the Church of the Saints of the first community of Jerusalem. Friends see Jerome as a reformed Christian, burning with zeal for the holiness of the church, the model for a pure and evangelical life.
- Renaissance humanism
An important cultural and spiritual component, in which Jerome is immersed, is the Christian humanism with its strong sense of individuality, action (how many verbs in the letters of Jerome!), attention to man. Saint Jerome has a vigorous sense of active virtue, he aims to modify reality with tenacity, he wants a spiritual rebirth, as a rebirth had happened in the field of letters and arts, he desires the reform of the Church and he works for it, resuming not so much the pagan culture, but the perennial source of the Gospel and of the Imitation of Christ. Jerome Emiliani is contemporary of the greats of the Renaissance, of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, of Pietro Bembo and Aretino, of Ludovico Ariosto and Baldassar Castiglione, of Michelangelo and Tiziano, he is in the circle of friends of the Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto. In this cultural world Jerome introduces the attention to the human dignity of the small and the excluded ones, to create in the educational field in the climate of the Renaissance, a new man able to form himself to the job, to be child of God and temple of the Spirit. Jerome, in fact, aims at the enhancement of man, in this case of the child and the boy, in his earthly and individual dimension with his intellectual and manual skills, in his dignity as a citizen who must, with the learning of a job, provide for his livelihood; he works tirelessly to change what is negative in society, involving especially the lay component of the Church; he stands in the field in front of suffering and limits (standum in acie, one must stand on the battlefield according to the clearest Renaissance precept; he wants to return to the ancient Christian values, that is, to the Church of the saints of Jerusalem; he seeks the glory of Christ so that it may shine in whoever he approaches.
- The influence of Fra Battista da Crema
There is, actually, a person who has the spiritual paternity, in comparison with the great pioneers of the Catholic reform and the merit of having inculcated fidelity to the Church, despite the late oppositions encountered because of his writings, later accused of Pelagianism. He is Friar Giovanni Battista da Crema (1460-1534). He was a religious of the Dominican congregation of Lombardy and had in the convent of S. Maria delle Grazie in Milan, as a co-disciple, Savonarola, and as a teacher, the Blessed Sebastiano Maggi, whose remains are preserved in S. Maria di Castello in Genoa. He was a great spiritual director, a tireless preacher, an author of ascetic books centered on the imitation of the Crucifix and the fight against tepidity. In 1519, he was chosen as spiritual director by Saint Gaetano Thiene, whom he sent first to Venice and then to Rome. In the 1520s, he was prior of St. John and Paul for a few years and his preaching was most likely heard by St. Jerome
In 1528 he began the spiritual direction of Saint Antonio Maria Zaccaria.
However, Friar Battista da Crema, venerated as a father by the Barnabites and by the Angeliche, in spite of the late suspicions of the Holy Office for some aspects of his teaching considered polluted with Pelagianism, binds together St. Gaetano, St. Anthony Zaccaria, St. Jerome himself, establishing – with his direct or indirect influence – between the three congregations born from the heart of these saints (Theatines, Barnabites, Somascans) a spiritual kinship.
Written by Father Giuseppe Oddone, CRS
Translated by Father Julian Gerosa, CRS