February 16th.  St. Benedict Joseph Labré.

Born near Boulogne in 1748, one of 15 children, he tried to become first a Cistercian and then a Carthusian, but was clearly cut out for neither vocation.  He then set out on a pilgrimage to Rome, and was so uplifted by the experience that he became a ‘professional pilgrim’, journeying to Loreto, Assisi, Compostela, Paray-le-Monial, Einsiedeln in Switzerland, and other places.  He lived in the utmost poverty, not begging, but accepting food from the well-disposed.  Any money offered to him he usually gave away.  In 1774 he returned to Rome and ‘settled’ there, sleeping rough in the Colosseum, praying by day in numerous churches.  Obliged by ill-health to resort to a hospice, he often walked out of the door with his daily bowl of soup and offered it to others.  In Holy Week 1783 he collapsed in the church of Santa Maria dei Monti near the Colosseum, one of his favourite haunts, and died in a nearby butcher’s house.  The visitor to the bedroom-shrine which is the place of his death will find it occupied by a somewhat incongruous and floor-weakening life-size marble reproduction of the saint’s death bed, complete with sculpted occupant.  He is the Western equivalent of the wandering holy man of the East, and the purpose of his life cannot be judged according to ‘normal’ human criteria.  He was held by the Romans to be a living saint; formal acknowledgment of that came in 1881.  He is the patron of tramps and the homeless.