Saint Gerard Majella

Redemptorist Lay Brother

Feast Day

October 16

Life

1726–1755

Canonized

1904

Order

Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer (Redemptorists)

Born

Muro Lucano, Kingdom of Naples (modern Italy)

Gerard Majella was born in April 1726 at Muro Lucano, a town about fifty miles south of Naples. His father, a tailor, died while Gerard was a child, and his mother, reduced to poverty, apprenticed him to the tailor's trade. After being refused by the Capuchins on account of his youth and frail health, he was admitted in 1749 as a lay brother to the recently founded Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer — the Redemptorists of Saint Alphonsus Liguori — serving as tailor, sacristan, gardener, porter, and infirmarian.

Gerard's brief religious life was marked by an extraordinary spirit of obedience and by charity to the poor, who called him the 'Father of the Poor.' The witnesses at his canonisation process testified to remarkable gifts: ecstasies, prophecy, the reading of consciences, bilocation, and numerous healings. When a young woman falsely accused him of grave sin, he made no defence, accepting the consequences in silence until the accuser, herself falling ill, retracted the charge — an episode that established him as a patron of the falsely accused.

The patronage for which he is most widely loved arose from an incident near the end of his life: on leaving the home of a family at Muro he dropped his handkerchief, and when a girl ran to return it he told her to keep it, for she would one day have need of it. Years later, in danger of death in childbirth, she called for the handkerchief and was safely delivered. From such accounts Gerard came to be invoked throughout the Catholic world by expectant mothers and by those who long for children.

He died of tuberculosis at Materdomini, near Caposele, on 16 October 1755, at the age of twenty-nine. Pope Leo XIII beatified him on 29 January 1893, and Pope Pius X canonised him on 11 December 1904. His feast is kept on 16 October.