“Then a Hail Mary for the Capuchin fathers”
Every day, Saint Jerome Emiliani, a lay saint of the Renaissance and Catholic Reformation, born in Venice in 1486 and who died in Somasca in 1537, founder of the Company of the Servants of the Poor, which after the Council of Trent would become the Order of Clerics Regular of Somasca, made his orphaned boys and his companions pray in this way. For us Somascans, this invocation is part of our prayer, an ardent prayer addressed to Jesus to reform the Church and restore it to that state of holiness that existed at the time of the first apostles. It began precisely like this: Sweet Father, our Lord Jesus Christ, we pray to you for your infinite goodness that you reform all of Christianity to that state of holiness that existed at the time of your holy apostles. This was followed by a prayer of intercession for faith and hope in God alone, then for the entire celestial Church, that it may be honored by us in its saints, the earthly Church formed by saints and sinners, for the Church in a state of purification, for the missionary Church; then intercession was made for those who committed themselves to the holiness of the Church and who collaborated (including the Capuchin Fathers), then for all the people who worked in the Company of the Servants of the Poor or helped it, and finally for peace and concord in society. This prayer, specifically desired by Saint Jerome, was recited twice a day, in the morning and in the evening, under the care of the Fathers in orphanages and then also in seminaries. It was recited for a couple of centuries; it is still said today, though only selecting certain intentions.
The reform of the Church was Jerome’s great thirst: he was very devoted to Saint Francis because he saw in him his model of holiness and poverty, of Church reform. In Somasca he wanted to build a small oratory in his honor. In Saint Jerome, as in Saint Francis, the dream of the holy origins of the Pentecostal and apostolic Church reappears (in Saint Jerome with a new Renaissance sensibility). The holiness of the Church is the ideal to be achieved, to be always actualized. It is the holiness of the early Church, described in the Acts, to be realized today in our time and in our lives. It is the holiness of the Church of Jerusalem, praying, close to the apostles and Mary, sharing its goods, breaking the bread of the Eucharist together. For Saint Paul, spiritual goods are communicated to the world and to new Churches by the mother Church, precisely the Church of the Saints, the Church of Jerusalem.
The Capuchin Fathers were therefore born in the same period in which the Servants of the Poor began their activity, before the Council of Trent (1525-1545): it was for civil society the period of the Renaissance with its desire to return to origins and to re-evaluate human dignity. For more sensitive Christians it was the moment to renew the Church from within: religious like the Franciscan friar Bonaventure Cenci who preached at the Incurables hospital in Venice, lay people like Jerome Emiliani, the field of action of Jerome, priests like Gaetano Thiene, founder of the Theatines, friend of Jerome, believed that the Church had to renew itself, rediscover the mercy of God and the cross of Jesus, reorganize the spiritual life of the faithful with the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, live the Gospel literally, practice works of charity, to give civil and Christian dignity to the little ones, the poor, and the sick, to women.
The Somascans and the Capuchins were therefore born in the same historical period, in the spiritual climate of returning to the sources of the Gospel, of a desire for reform, with a commitment to personal sanctification and to exercising works of charity. In the climate of the Company of Divine Love, Capuchins and Servants of the Poor immediately established relationships of mutual interest and common help.
Jerome favored the introduction of the Capuchins in Bergamo with the help of the nobleman Domenico Tasso; the Capuchin friar Giovanni da Fano entrusted to Jerome in 1536 the orphans he had gathered in Brescia, friar Girolamo Molfetta, also a Capuchin, was alongside Jerome in his apostolate, assisted him in his death and dedicated to the Servants of the Poor in 1539, with a dedicatory epistle, the publication of a small work entitled: Of Divine Love, with sincere admiration for Jerome Miani, who had died two years earlier, who had an ardent desire to draw and unite to God every state, rank and condition of men and showed very clear signs, even burning with divine charity for love of the Gospel and so that the kingdom of God might increase, abandoning riches, very noble relatives and a most illustrious homeland, having thrown himself into the arms of his beloved, naked and crucified Jesus Christ, after a brief pilgrimage he began with you poor ones…
And I pray the Lord that he may increase so much divine fire in your hearts… following the example of said Messer Hyeronimo, whom I, though dead, hold in singular veneration… and from here may follow the universal reformation of the Church for which he had an ardent thirst and ordered a particular prayer.”
1. Saint Jerome Emiliani
A brief biographical note then on Saint Jerome Emiliani, the founder of the Somascan Fathers, who felt the need to pray twice a day for the Capuchin Fathers.
Saint Jerome Emiliani (Venice 1486 – Somasca 1537), the founder of the Order of the Somascan Fathers, was a noble Venetian layman and lived in the cultural climate of the Italian Renaissance and the Catholic Reformation before the Council of Trent (1545-1563).
He was born in Venice in 1486, at the time of the greatest splendor of this Republic, into a family of ancient nobility. He received a schooling and an education aimed at serving the State. After the Venetian defeat at Agnadello in 1509, in the long defensive war that followed until the peace of 1516, Jerome was involved in risky military operations. As castellan of a militarily strategic location in Castelnuovo di Quero, he was taken prisoner on August 27, 1511, and the entire garrison of the fortress was massacred. He spent a month of exhausting captivity and managed to escape on the night between September 27 and 28, 1511, after having made a vow to the Madonna, venerated under the title of Madonna Grande of Treviso, to come to her sanctuary and to change his life. Jerome changed gradually, but with a continuous ascent: from a carefree and worldly youth, he became a practicing Christian, then fervent and absorbed in holy thoughts, then penitent and ascetic to follow Christ Crucified, finally a hero of charity.
After having taken care of his orphaned nephews, from 1527 onwards he dedicated himself exclusively to works of mercy: in Venice he established two schools for destitute children, i.e., abandoned children and orphans of both parents, he founded near the Church of San Giovanni e Paolo the Bersaglio Hospital where he gathered every human misery, and he was for over a year director of the Incurables Hospital. A lay confrere of the Company of Divine Love, he was sent on a mission of charity to the mainland and Lombardy. Everywhere, fervent and a refuge for the poor, he was an incendiary of love: in Verona, in Brescia, particularly in Bergamo, then in Milan, Pavia, Como, and Somasca he founded homes and schools for orphans and opened himself to every form of help for the least in society.
From his ardent desire to reform the Church through works of charity, forming evangelical communities both within hospitals and in places where he gathered abandoned children, an intense educational activity was born, based first of all on the learning of Christian doctrine and on education for a job that would allow orphans a positive reintegration into society. From his Renaissance mindset he drew the commitment to enhancing the human being, in this case the child, in his earthly and individual dimension with his intellectual and manual gifts, in his dignity as a citizen who must, by learning a job, provide for his own sustenance, in his greatness as a Christian who, with faith in Christ and the imitation of his life, becomes a child of God and a temple of the Spirit.
To support his works, he attracted several people and founded the Company of the Servants of the Poor, which later became, after the Council of Trent with Saint Pius V (1568), whom he had met in Bergamo in 1536 as inquisitor, the Order of the Clerics Regular of Somasca.
Jerome Emiliani (or Miani as he was popularly called) died in Somasca, a small village near Lecco, on February 8, 1537, a martyr of charity in assisting his sick children and those afflicted by the plague in the San Martino Valley. He was immediately venerated as blessed by the people and proclaimed a saint in 1767. In 1928, he was declared by the Church Universal Patron of orphans and abandoned youth.
2. His writings
Six autograph letters written between 1534 and 1537 to his collaborators remain of him, part of the manuscript of the minutes of the Chapter of Brescia of June 4, 1536, and some catechistic notes that flowed into the catechism of Reginaldo Nerli, particularly the first lessons on the Cross of the Lord.
Elements of Spirituality Common to Saint Jerome Miani and Saint Padre Pio
I am convinced that many elements of the charism of the Capuchins and of Padre Pio in particular find a counterpart also in the spirituality of Saint Jerome Emiliani. I will limit myself to comparing only a few aspects: the way of communicating, the cross of Jesus, the Eucharist, devotion to the Virgin Mary, the apostolate as a grace to work for brothers.
3. Communication
Every person who educates and relates to another person has their own inspiring core, their own theory of communication, mostly subliminal and unconscious, on the mode of contact with others. If we examine the six letters of Saint Jerome, it is possible to trace the guiding ideas of his way of communicating with adults and children. Saint Jerome clearly identifies two types of communication: “About Messer Zuane, one should not speak to him with dead letters, like my letters, but one must pray for him and speak to him with living words of life.” Jerome always unites prayer and word; he doesn’t like to write dead letters, but to pray and communicate words of life. A first purpose of communication is therefore to pray and speak living words of life.
A second is to show with facts and words so that the Lord may be glorified in the listener: “Your poor father greets you and comforts you in the love of Christ and observance of the Christian rule, as in the time I was with you I showed with facts and words, so much so that the Lord was glorified in you through me.” The text is a biblical allusion from the first to the last word: poor, father, comfort in the love of Christ, in the time I was with you, show, glorify… everything has an evangelical resonance. We find the same expression “show with facts” also in a strong polemical context regarding the choice of work: “others murmur and have this need for words and we have shown the desire with facts.” The word is empty if it is not accompanied by facts, by testimony.
Another purpose of communication is to comfort in the love of Christ, to confirm brothers in faith. The word always arises in a climate of faith, it is never an empty word that sounds and does not create, but a word that sounds and aims to establish a relationship of love and conversion. To communicate is finally to make understood by Christ. It is to do and say what the Spirit inspires or shows you. It is to pray and speak, to pray and say under the action of the Spirit effective words at that instant. Prayer and word form an inseparable link: the word that educates and transforms is an aspect of Christ’s work in those instruments that allow themselves to be guided by the Spirit. The inspiring core of word and educational action can be summarized in an active commitment, in the “grace of operating,” that is, in an action dictated by the Spirit: to pray, to see, to do what is required of you at this precise moment and what the Lord shows you, so that you may say it and do it.
4. Padre Pio’s Communication
“I confess first of all that for me it is a great misfortune not to know how to express and bring out all this always burning volcano that consumes me and that Jesus has placed in this small heart.
Everything is summarized in this: I am devoured by the love of God and by the love of my neighbor. God is always fixed in my mind and imprinted in my heart. I never lose sight of Him: I have to admire His beauty, His smiles, and His disturbances, His mercies, His vengeances or rather the rigors of His justice.
Imagine with all this deprivation of one’s own freedom, with all this binding of both spiritual and corporal powers, by what feelings the poor soul is devoured.
Believe me, father, that the outbursts I sometimes had were caused precisely by this harsh imprisonment, let’s call it fortunate.”
Immersed in the always burning volcano of Jesus’ love: from this his communication is born. It is a lived and living Word of God in him, which burns in contact with God, and in mystical union and assimilation of the passion of Jesus. Extraordinary mystic Padre Pio who said “I remain a mystery to myself” and defined himself as “I am just a man who prays,” that is, who lives in continuous contact with God. His was a prophetic word, usually sweet, tender and comforting for repentant sinners, but sometimes vehement and rude (his outbursts!) that chased away, denounced and shamed, if he did not see a will to convert, because he had the gift of reading hearts. For this reason, his sayings, his sentences, sometimes expressed in dialect, had an oracular value, they pierced the heart, they were incandescent lava from that always burning volcano that burned within him, they were considered a continuation and an application of the Gospel.
Not only his words, but his gestures and especially his gaze communicated beyond words, whether sweet or harsh: it was always an inquiring gaze that penetrated the soul like a beam of light that uncovers and frames what one might want to keep hidden in the depths of one’s being. Since he had the gift of introspection into consciences, he wanted to illuminate everything with the light of God and orient people to conversion, to the discovery of the love of Christ and the mystery of the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus that he lived in his body. “He looked at me intently. I wouldn’t know how to describe that gaze, but it’s still here, inside me. It was a fire that penetrated me to the deepest fibers of my soul, body, brain. I felt myself melt. My body became light, the weight I had in my heart disappeared, my legs bent and I fell to my knees. A great joy invaded me. I was certain of having received a great help.”
His very rich correspondence, addressed to his superiors, confreres, and spiritual directors, but above all to the people he spiritually directed, also arises in a climate of prayer: “I will offer many Masses in order to receive the light of the Holy Spirit to resolve well and to guide you to that perfection to which you are called…” “I will never cease to pray to the Holy Spirit to establish your spirit ever more in his obedience, in his purest and most holy love…” “I told you in the Lord…” But his was not simply writing; every letter was a spiritual visit, a kind of loving presence in the hearts of the people he directed: it is the style of one who has mystical and inner contact, as if the person addressed in the letter were before him and he saw her; it is an incisive and persuasive, exhortative style, rich in affective and engaging expressions, exclamations, interrogatives, revealing a compassionate person with intense feelings: “If it depended on us, my dear, to stand, oh! Then we would never stand!” Both in Jerome Miani and in Padre Pio, communication therefore arises from contact with God, from incessant and continuous prayer, from praying and speaking words of life, establishing a personal contact, after having nourished themselves and assimilated Scripture, which has become the substance of thought, so that the words spoken or written are useful “at that instant” when the Spirit illuminates, and the brother or sister to whom one addresses oneself is illuminated and our Lord Jesus Christ is glorified.