Novena of Saint Jerome
By Fr. Giuseppe Oddone.
Translated by Fr. Remo Zanatta and Fr.Julian Gerosa
- Jerome’s activity in Lombardy (1532-1536)
Jerome is an attentive seeker of God’s will. It is manifested to him in Sacred Scripture, in inner inspirations, in the unexpected. In the spring of 1532, Jerome was sent on a mission of charity to the diocese of Bergamo. It was probably the Carafa who sent him at the request of Bishop Pietro Lipomano. On his way to Bergamo, Jerome stopped in Padua, Vicenza, Verona (where he was a guest of his friend Mons. Giberti), and in Brescia. His confreres of Divine Love lodged him in the various hospitals.
7.1. The passage to Brescia on May 9th, 1532
Jerome was in Brescia on May 9th, the feast of the Ascension. He participated in a conference of the Members of Divine Love in the Church of St. John the Baptist. The Brothers have confessed and communicated. Jerome attended the Holy Mass with such humility and devotion. After Mass, Jerome addressing to the brethren of Divine Love, thanked God who had entered our homes, ascended to heaven, and added that we had done something wrong, when, while we had our mind elevated to heaven, we started rummaging through the bags to publicly give the offering. The offer for the priest was convenient to prepare first and then secretly collect more money among us, without risk of pride and vainglory. This is the testimony of the chronicler Nassino.
St. Angela Merici, the founder of the Ursulines (Desenzano sul Garda 1474 – Brescia 1540), was also active in Brescia. Orphan at an early age, united with her sister by an uncle, she became a Franciscan tertiary. After pilgrimages to the Holy Land (in 1524) and to Rome for the jubilee of 1525, encouraged by Clement VII, she founded in Brescia the Company of St. Ursula (in 1535), for the education of children and young women. The aggregates had to live in the world, not obliged to a life in common nor required to wear a habit. Her contemporaries considered her a “living saint”.
We have no documents that speak of a direct encounter between Jerome and Angela Merici. Fr. Paltrinieri, in the addition to the life of St. Jerome written by Fr. Stanislao Santinelli, enumerates eleven collaborators of Jerome from Brescia, and mentions the news given by Pandolfo Nassino. Giovan Giacomo Bandinelli, a friend of the Blessed Angela Merici, leads Jerome to the Church of San Giovanni Battista. In Brescia, Jerome Miani founded a small house for orphans near Porta San Giovanni. Those who helped him most with the offerings and moral authority were Paolo Averoldo, Giacomo Chizzola, Agostino Gallo (famous for his studies in agriculture), and Giovanni Battista Luzzago. They admirably helped the pious house that was later called the place of mercy, or “the orphanage of Mercy”. They were also people who supported the work of Angela Merici and who revolved around the hospital of the Incurables and the work of the Converts. In Brescia, in 1536, Jerome also gathered in his orphanage the orphans of Giovanni Battista da Fano. According to a common opinion, Angela Merici sent to Jerome the young priest Stefano Bertazzoli of Salò, brother-in-law of a dear friend of the saint, Giovan Battista Scaini, to whom were addressed two letters that have reached us.
It is easy to find in Angela Merici many points of contact with Jerome Miani. We are in the season of the Renaissance. Angela’s spirituality is characterized first of all by a process of individualization, internalization, and moralization of religious life through prayer, penance, charity. In essence, she wanted to give dignity, awareness of the mission of women in society and in the Church. It is deviant to see the Ursuline Society only as a charitable institution aimed at religious instruction, the protection of girls, and assistance in hospitals: in this perspective the theological and spiritual foundations of Angela’s experience are not understood and obscured.
7.2. The activity in Bergamo
Having arrived in Bergamo with extraordinary energy, Jerome organized the works of charity, founding a house for orphans (in the suburb of San Leonardo in some rooms of the hospital of La Maddalena), a house for orphan girls, and a shelter for converts. The bishop was amazed by the zeal of Jerome, in organizing works of charity throughout the diocese, in his ability to involve people, and in his courage in caring for the sick.
In Bergamo, he is assisted by a priest Don Agostini Barili, his close collaborator. However, in his work to meet the needs of orphans and converts Jerome had set himself the goal of involving nobles and citizens. He wanted them to help to take care of the orphans, to be their protectors, and he wanted them to support the works that he gradually established. With the same spirit, Jerome approached matrons of sincere fame, honest and prudent, of good morals so that they might also help in the government and in the care of orphan girls and converts.
Jerome was very determined and convincing in presenting his proposals. He said that God allows the poor to exist because they are a call from God to provoke our conversion, so that those who have means make them available to those who do not have them, and the poor themselves can in turn recognize in those who help them with living alms the same God in his providence.
7.3. Our Lady Ludovica Tasso
Among the people who were fascinated by the holiness of Miani and his fervent words were Domenico Tasso and his sister Ludovica. The Tasso family, very rich, were contracted by the Papal State to run the postal service. They had similar interests in Spain, Flanders, and Germany. They were cousins of Bernardo Tasso, author of a chivalrous poem, the Amadigi, future father of the great poet Torquato.
Jerome’s example and words had made Madonna Ludovica aware of her obligations towards the poor, especially towards the street women who converted and returned to faith and devotion. She felt the need to help them with alms and goods that God had given her. She also nourished a deep devotion to the Eucharist. The collaboration with Jerome really made her understand that the poor are a provocation and a stimulus to a life of faith. She helped them with regular and substantial offers of money that she gave both to Jerome and to the first Fathers of the servants of the poor. For the converts in particular she nourished a sincere affection and charity.
7.4. The social condition of women in the sixteenth century
If we consider the social condition of women in the sixteenth century, we can say that only two honorable solutions of life were envisaged for them: either marriage, usually arranged by parents, with the specific task of procreation of children, sometimes with a commercial alliance for the preservation and expansion of family heritage, or monastic life.
If this did not happen, the woman would have no choice but to live a life as spinster, normally locked up at home and maintained by her family. In the worst circumstances, in order to be able to eat and live, women would end up on the streets and sell their bodies, almost always under the control of a protector.
If we read the will of Marco, brother of Jerome, we see the insistence with which he expresses his will that his daughter Cristina becomes a nun, also not to disperse the family heritage. Very reluctantly and only later he would accept the risk for her to remain “single”, kept at home with board and lodging by his other son Angelo.
7.5. The foundation of houses for converts
With a few rare exceptions, the life of the prostitute was exposed to male exploitation and violence, to illness, given the enormous spread of venereal diseases, for which the hospitals of the Incurables were born at that time. They were exposed to an uncertain life of poverty and wandering. If they did not die early, their professional career could last from adolescence till twenty-five years, then they were more marginalized, also because of a ruthless competition.
Poor among the poor, prostitutes faced a double suffering: the physical one of hardship and misery, and the moral one of religious marginalization and contempt, because considered in mortal sin by the so-called good people, a cause of mortal sin for men, a source of social disorder through because of the transmission of diseases, illegal abortions, and abandonment of new born.
Jerome Miani, a fervent refuge for the poor, felt for the love of Christ attracted by the situation of these prostitutes, who at the time were really the last among the poor. The biographers tell us that he personally collaborated in the foundation of three communities to save them from physical and moral misery and was a model for initiatives of this kind.
In Bergamo, he involved Bishop Pietro Lipomano and various nobles of the city, including members of the rich Tasso family. At first, he looked for some matrons who were willing to welcome them, at least temporarily. Then he started looking for a house for them and found it in Bergamo “Alta”, near the Church of San Michele al Pozzo Bianco. In Bergamo, Jerome himself took the situation to the heart. He went to visit the places where they used to exercise their profession, he faced “in bad meetings” their protectors. One night, while walking through the streets of Bergamo, he met two prostitutes who did not have a place to stay. Jerome urged them to change their lives and, after their promise, led them to the home of a pious woman who welcomed them lovingly and treated them with all kindness. Jerome knew how to go to the heart of their suffering. With gentleness and the power of the Spirit he convinced them to change their lives.
His friend Matteo Giberti, bishop of Verona, who invited Jerome to help him found a community of this kind in his city, also his good qualities. Jerome went there, probably, in the autumn of 1533, and was able to speak with such conviction and effectiveness that thirty of these women decided to change their lives. First, he gathered them in a secured place in the Hospital of Misericordia, until the Bishop made the house of the abbey of the Holy Trinity available to them. A woman, Dorotea Quistella della Mirandola, collaborated with Jerome. She directed the work with competence and passion for about twenty years. She left all her resources to it. On January 25th, 1551, Dorotea, advanced in years, convinced the directors of that hospital of Misericordia to preserve this beneficial institution, founded by Jerome and Giberti, where she had spent all her life. Her request was granted.
According to the testimonies of the beatification process, Jerome also took part in the institution of the converts of Santa Valeria in Milan, in which many of his co-operators were involved. He was in favor of a gradual path of conversion: a few rules, until the converts themselves internalized the need for penance and attendance at the sacraments.
7.6. The Word of Jerome
How did Jerome communicate with these people? Certainly, according to what he said, praying for them and “speaking lively words of life”. In fact, he described to us in a letter how to behave in front of a person who made a mistake. He said, “you need to talk with such patience, because it belongs to us to bear our neighbor. We need to excuse him within us, to pray for him, to say some gentle words to him in a Christian way, praying the Lord that he will make us worthy with our patience and our meek talk of saying such words to him that he will be enlightened by his error at that moment. The Lord allows you to find yourself in front of a person who is wrong, for your own sake and for his benefit, so that you may learn to be patient, to know human frailty, and then, so that whoever is wrong, through you, may be enlightened and may the heavenly Father be glorified in his Christ. You must not run away from such a thorny situation: do not say ‘this is something not to be endured; he will not believe me; I am not good for this thing; it would be better if another spoke to him’. But you must think that only God is good and that Christ works in those instruments that let themselves be guided by the Holy Spirit”.
Only with his patience and understanding, with his sweetness, his strength and his spiritual fervor, could Jerome say to these people the words that Jesus inspired him at that moment, animated by the Spirit, to touch their hearts and open them to divine grace.
7.7. The passage to Milan (1533)
Driven by his enthusiasm, his organizational and educational skills, and by his zeal in spreading the faith, at the end of 1533, Jerome crosses the Adda River and goes to Milan. He came from Verona, where he stayed for about a month. 34 orphans were with him, along with some followers who were attracted by Jerome and who left everything for the sake of Gospel. They were housed in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, near the home of Dominico Sauli, where on February 14, 1534 Alexander Sauli will be born, the future Banabite Saint. Domenico Sauli was an interesting character. He was involved in politics, in the birth of new religious Orders (in particular the Banabites), and in literature. M. Francesco Berni dedicated to him a personal remake of the “Orlando Innamorato” of Boiardo. It was precisely to Domenico Sauli, whom Jerome had met in Venice between 1525 and 1527, and who now invited him to come alone to his home, that Jerome politely refused and said: “With these brothers of mine I want to live and die”. In Milan he obtained that his orphans be lodged in some rooms of the hospital of San Martino. He also founded a house for orphans, he collaborated, according to the testimony of the beatification process, at the Institution of the house of the Converts of Santa Valeria.
In Milan, too, Jerome attracted and gathered around himself a discreet group of collaborators.
7.8. Somasca: the organization of the Company of the Servant of the Poor
From Milan, stopping in Merone at Leone Carpani’s home, Jerome went to Somasca, where he organized the Company of the Servants of the Poor, gathered a group of orphans in the “Valletta” and at the “Fortress.” He stayed for the first time in the house of the Ondei and here always lived a part of his family. In Somasca, Jerome established the ‘confraternity of peace’ to help his orphans. The confraternity managed properties and had a women’s section with its own house, a “domus mulierum” that welcomed widows and single women, perhaps even orphan girls. In Somasca, Jerome lived a life of penance, prayer, work, and catechesis, for which he always asked the help of his orphans.
7.9. Como, Venice, Vicenza (1535)
In 1535, Jerome founded in Como a house for orphans. In the late spring of that same year, he returned to Venice where his presence was requested and aroused great admiration for his works and for his virtues. He had great compassion for people away from God. He visited his friends and filled them with holy memories and Christian hopes. His greatest friends were the Carafa, Andrea and Pietro Lippomano, Giberti and many others. But in first place there were always his dear poor, who represented Christ.
He stayed at the hospital of Bersaglio, wrote some letters to his collaborators in Lombardy, then suddenly at the end of July he resumed his way back, stopping in Vicenza. Here, he was hosted for a day by Bianca Trissino (who later died in Venice in 1540), second wife of the humanist Giangiorgio Trissino (1478 – 1550), a leading figure in Renaissance literature, author of an epic poem “Italy liberated from the Goths”.
It was possible that the Trissinos, one of the most important families of the Vicenza aristocracy, were friends with the Miani family, in particular with Marco Miani’s son, Angelo, at that time just over thirty years of age. Either moved by his own zeal, or urged by others, always looking for qualified citizens or noblewomen to help him in caring for the poor, Jerome passed through the Trissino house and stayed there for a whole day, treated with exquisite hospitality. With great determination, Bianca Trissino wished Jerome to stay overnight in their palace. But Jerome, with the same obstinate determination, did not accept and went to stay with the poor of the Hospital of Mercy. Bianca Trissino, was amazed, almost offended at that refusal. She immediately gave news to Jerome’s nephew, Angelo, almost to justify that she was not able to force his uncle to stay in their home. She asked for an explanation of this strange way of behaving.
Jerome was still in Venice on July 21, 1535 (date of the second letter) and he must have left urgently a few days later. Angelo’s letter to Bianca Trissino was dated July 29 of the same month. A tight turn of the mail, therefore, as if to indicate the need for an immediate clarification. It is worth reporting the whole letter of his nephew, because it makes us understand how much the way of reasoning and living of Jerome, who had radically chosen a life with the poor and detachment from his family, was far from the common mentality and respectability of many Christians of the time.
Here is the letter:
“Magnificent Madonna Bianca, like a sister to me,
your love for us and that of Sir Giovan Giorgio is certainly great. I rejoice in the good news that you have given me, that the Magnificent Jerome, our uncle, in those few days who stayed in Vicenza, was content to come and stay one day at your home. I am very gracious for the loving kindness that you used him and the offer that you made to keep him longer. However, you should not be marveled if he has refused to accept the invitation to stay longer at your home, because here in Venice he stays day and night with the poor of the Hospital of Bersaglio, which he has set up with the help of certain citizens. When he left, he did not let himself be seen at our home, but only sent a certain Pilgrim Father to tell Dionora and Luigi, asking that we pray to God for him. He was going to do penance for his sins and to complete his life. May Our Lord give him all he desires and I commend myself you.
In Venice, on Friday 29 July 1535.
Like a brother, Angelo Miani”.
7.10. Pavia, Brescia, Verona, Bergamo, Somasca (1535-1536)
When he returned to Lombardy, he founded new houses for orphans in Pavia and Brescia, where he gathered his company on June 4, 1536. In September 1536, he went with his friends from Salò to Verona to greet the bishops Matteo Giberti, Gian Pietro Carafa, Reginaldo Pole who were leaving for Rome. According to the testimony of his friend, a Salodian priest Stefano Bertazzoli, who was present, Girolamo took part in the discussion on the reform of the Church and appeared full of the Holy Spirit, endowed with the gift of prophecy. Jerome spoke warmly of the Church, bride of Christ, torn apart by the Lutheran sect, and affirmed that the times of suffering and martyrdom were coming. On his return, he said goodbye to his friends in Salò.
Before Christmas 1536, he went to Bergamo to greet the Vicar General, Giovanni Battista Guillermi from Feltre. He knelt before him, recommended his faith in Christ and asked him for forgiveness.
The reform of the Church based on the faith of Christ, on the truths revealed by him, has always been the ardent thirst of Jerome.
He then returned to Somasca to take care of his orphans and to train his collaborators, in particular the Servants of the Poor, in faith. Jerome often retired to a cave for his contemplations.