Novena of Saint Jerome
By Fr. Giuseppe Oddone.
Translated by Fr. Remo Zanatta and Fr.Julian Gerosa
- Jerome man of the Renaissance – The maternal figure
Let us reflect on the value of the Christian family, the cell of the Church and of society. It is God himself who wanted the family institution, who creates man and woman in order to form a family; Jesus sanctifies the union of the spouses with the sacrament of marriage, so that they may love each other in the Lord and realize the mutual love between Christ and his Church.
We want to go over the history of Jerome Miani’s family a little bit.
Let us immediately say in brief that Jerome Miani is a noble Venetian layman of the Renaissance, born in Venice in 1486 and died in Somasca in 1537. After some difficult military experiences, he became a saint of charity and an extraordinary and original educator of the “putti derelitti”, which means “the abandoned youth”.
2.1. The Italian Renaissance
The Renaissance is a period that occupies little more than a century, from the first decades of the fifteenth century until the mid-sixteenth century. At that time, Italy, divided into many states, experiences a moment of great cultural and civil splendor until the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent (1492), who with his policy of balance, without war, had stimulated a cultural and artistic growth in the various courts. Unfortunately, Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan, thinking he could strengthen his state, called Charles VIII King of France to Italy and in 1494 he descended to Italy to inaugurate the so-called wars of Italy, a long series of eight conflicts, defined as “horrendous” by Machiavelli. The great European powers (France – Spain – Germany – the Papal State – Venice) fought over the control of the peninsula, which ended only in 1559 with the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, that profoundly changed the political geography of Italy.
The culture of the Renaissance focuses on man, his dignity, the classical studies made with scientific and philological rigor and wants to return to antiquity, emulate and at the same time overcome the art, technology, and the glory of the Greco-Roman period. The man of the Renaissance (and Jerome is one of them, contemporary of Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo, Ariosto, Machiavelli … to name but a few) is very active, wants to work and make an impact on reality by valuing the dignity of the person, study, work, art.
2.2. The birth of Girolamo
We do not know with certainty the place where the Venetian noblewoman Eleonora Morosini gave birth to Jerome Miani, or to put it in words with the poets, “threw him on the divine beaches of light and he drank the first vital auras of the day, sucked from a vein of flesh the first mother’s milk, and the prodigy of existence opened up to him”. The thesis supported by all the biographers wants Jerome born in Venice on the house of the Rio Vidal a few tens of meters from the Grand Canal in a changing atmosphere of colors, light and water. Some scholars hypothesize today that Jerome was born in the roughest and most mountainous Feltre, where his father Angelo resided in that year, active “podestà” of the town. According to a seventeenth-century Feltre reporter, Angelo brought there his family from Venice.
Certainly, among all the women who entered Jerome’s life and conditioned it, the greatest influence was that of his mother.
Eleonora Morosini, daughter of Carlo Morosini from Lisbon, second wife of Angelo Miani, was born in 1452, last of six male children. According to a report from Sanudo, diarist and historian of Venice, Eleonora was baptized and the Empress Eleonora of Portugal was her Godmother, at that time passing through Venice with Emperor Frederick III returning from Rome after his coronation. The report suggests the desire and the competition between the various families Morosini to excel in the high Venetian aristocracy. In 1472, at the age of twenty, she married Angelo Miani, already a widower with a daughter, Cristina, and gave birth to Luca in 1475, Carlo in 1477, Marco in 1481, and Jerome in 1486.
2.3. Maternal influence
All the biographies and testimonies of the canonical processes for beatification highlight the profound Christian education that Jerome received from his mother, who also came from a very religious family. Two of her nephews, sons of her brother the Battista, became religious: Jerome Morosini, canon regular, and Nicholas, priest, disciple, and successor to the hermit Don Giovanni Regino. She was a true teacher of faith and piety and the seed she sowed in her son’s heart flourished again after the turbulence of youth and military life.
In addition to faith, her mother gave Jerome the pride of being Venetian, of being noble, of belonging to the social class that had done the greatness of Venice for better or for worse. The nobles followed the dominant culture of the time in the Republic, according to which Venice was a socially compact city, united, and not individualistic, politically free. An indirect confirmation can also be found in the large canvases of Vittore Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini, which show us the participation of the various social components (nobles, citizens, craftsmen) in the collective life. Venice is great for its trade: the squares, the wrinkles of Rialto, the warehouses are filled with all kinds of goods that come from the East and the mainland and market exchanges are very active. For the Venetian nobleman (including the Miani), being a merchant, especially with Constantinople and the lands of the East, is by no means a reason for dishonor, but rather an opportunity for wealth and social prestige.
Then Venice is great for its culture. The Miani and Morosini family also had a very high esteem for art and literature. The rich cultural life is also significant, and in the numerous printing shops it found its expression and its trade. Aldo Manuzio emerges among them all.
Venice is great for its government, for the administration of justice. Its arsenal is extraordinarily efficient, in which galleys and faster and more agile ships are built continuously. The city is admirable for its Christian piety, for all the Churches and charitable institutions. Splendid Venice for the elegance of its nobles wrapped in black dresses long to the ground, for the beauty of its noblewomen adorned with jewels and sumptuous in their robes. Finally, Venice is worthy of admiration for its palaces, its squares and its houses, which rest on the water of the sea.
In addition to her faith and love for her city, her mother carefully initiated Jerome to take part in political life.
We have three documents that can tell us more about the bond between Eleonora and Jerome. The first is from December 1, 1506. Eleonora Miani swore before the magistrates that Jerome was twenty years old, he was her legitimate son, so that he could participate in the Barbarella. On the day of St. Barbara, December 4, a lottery of one of the thirty golden balls gave the right to the lucky one to join the Major Council, before the prescribed age set at 25 years. Jerome was not lucky in that circumstance.
And so here is Eleonora’s second oath on October 10, 1511: she swears that her son is 25 years old and that from the following day he can take part as a member of the Great Council by right. He adds that the legitimacy of his birth was already sworn on December 1, 1506, and also specifies that from October 11, 1506, he was twenty years old. All this suggests that Jerome was born in Venice or Feltre on October 10, 1486.
Eleonora Morosini, therefore, in addition to giving Jerome the pride of belonging to the noble class, was concerned to provide him with all the opportunities to participate in the public and political life of the Republic. Jerome internalized his social status: he was always for all the magnificent Messer Ieronimo Miani, treated as equal without any inferiority complex the aristocrats of his time, even those who had more culture or wealth than him. Even when, in order to serve the poor (something almost unique in the Venetian aristocracy) he renounced the external and worldly privileges of his social class and took the habit of the poor by going to live with them, he did not refuse, he who became a reformed and noble gentleman according to the Gospel, the moral and spiritual ascendancy that gave him his native belonging to the aristocratic class. He used it to push other nobles and aristocrats to follow Christ and to do works of charity.
2.4. The mother’s will
We must not forget also the tenderness towards and the dream of the mother for Jerome: it transpires above all from his will of October 6, 1512, in which she divides her goods among his sons and declares that among the will executors, her brother Battista and her sons Marco and Jerome there must be “pro maiori et saviori parte”, listened to in particular for their common sense and their wisdom.
To her son Jerome, she left in particular two houses that yield 24 ducats of rent a year with the obligation in the first five years, after her death, to pay for prayers and Masses to be celebrated at St. Stephen for her soul. This is a gesture dictated by a deep faith and a religious mentality that has imbued her entire life. More specifically, not having any daughters, she leaves only to Jerome a ruby tied in gold, a sapphire tied in gold, a pendant with 8 pearls, 40 large loose pearls, various female hairpieces with pearls, her most beautiful clothes and a bedroom furniture. Mom Eleonora’s hope is clear. Jerome, on October 6, 1512, the date of her will, is 26 years old: it is time for him to get married. Eleonora dreams of a wife, a woman for her son, so that he can cover her with jewels, clothes, luxury items belonging to her mother, who would like to somehow relive and be remembered in the future bride. She did not see this dream come true and she died in 1514, at the age of 72; the war in Venice with the European powers was not yet over and her sons, in particular Jerome, were still involved in risky military operations.
With time Jerome internalized this maternal tenderness: he diverted that tenderness not towards a woman, but towards the ranks of the poor, in particular the derelict putti, who became his family.