A SAINT FOR THE WEEK.

August 16th.

St. Roch (Rocco).

Born about 1350 in Montepellier in Southern France, the son of a merchant, he decided to live as a hermit and later took to the life of pilgrimage.  On a pilgrimage to Rome (1368) he caught the plague and, abandoned by others, was fed in some woodland near Piacenza by a dog which brought him food and would not leave him.  He then acquired the reputation of curing others who were plague-stricken.  One version of his story is that he returned to Montpellier, was rejected by his family, and imprisoned as an impostor.  Another is that he was imprisoned in Northern Italy as a suspect spy, and died there (1380?).  His cult quickly became popular.  At the church of St. Rocco in Venice, the painter Tintoretto was to paint a famous cycle of paintings telling his life-story.  Roch is usually depicted as a pilgrim with a sore on one leg, accompanied by a dog with a loaf in its mouth.  His popularity waned in the 16th. century, but recovered in the 19th., as an intercessor in time of cholera.