Benedict Joseph Labre

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Saint Benedict Joseph Labre
Beggar of Perpetual Adoration
Born	March 25, 1748, Amettes, Boulogne-sur-Mer
Died	April 17, 1783, Rome
Venerated in	Roman Catholic Church
Beatified	1859 by Pius IX
Canonized	December 8, 1883
Feast	April 16
Attributes	tri-cornered hat, alms
Patronage	Unmarried men (bachelors), rejects, mental illness, mentally ill people, insanity, beggars, hobos, the homeless
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Saint Benedict Joseph Labre (1748 – 1783) was a French mendicant and Roman Catholic saint. The oldest of fifteen children, he was born in Amettes, near Arras in the north of France, and was religious from a very early age. He was noted for performing public acts of penance for his sins, even minor sins. At the age of sixteen, he attempted to join the Trappists, Carthusians, and Cistercians, but each order rejected him as unsuitable for communal life. The abbots of these orders suspected mental illness that would make Labre unable to fulfill the vow of obedience necessary for any cloistered religious.

He therefore settled on a life of poverty and pilgrimage. He travelled to most of the major shrines of Europe, often multiple times, and begged for his food while giving away any alms offered to him. He visited Loreto, Assisi, Naples, and Bari in Italy, Einsiedeln in Switzerland, Paray-le-Monial in France, and Compostela in Spain. Although his choices seem extreme, Labre was following in the role of the mendicant, the "Fool-for-Christ," found more often in the Eastern Church. He would often swoon when contemplating the crown of thorns, in particular, and, during these states, his legend says that he would levitate or bilocate. He was also said to have cured some of the other homeless he met and to have multiplied bread for them.

This life, however, was exceptionally difficult. In the last years of his life (his thirties), he lived in Rome and made only a yearly pilgrimage to Loreto. He was a familiar figure in the city and known as the "saint of the Forty Hours" for his dedication to the Quarant' Ore. In his final weeks, he was taken into a house out of charity, despite his protestations. He died of his malnutrition on April 16, during Holy Week, in 1783. His confessor, Marconi, wrote his biography and attributed 136 separate cures to his intercession within three months of Labre's death. Those miracles were instrumental in the conversion of the Reverend John Thayer, the first American Protestant clergyman to convert to Catholicism, who was resident in Rome at the time of St. Benedict's death. A cult grew up around him very soon after his death, and he was made Venerable by Pius IX in 1859, with canonization by Leo XIII in 1881. His feast day in the Roman Catholic Church is April 16.