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Saint Jerome Emiliani

Religious

Feast Day
February 8
Life
1486–1537
Canonized
1767
Order
Founder, Order of Clerics Regular of Somasca (Somascans, CRS)
Born
Venice, Republic of Venice

Girolamo Miani (Latin: Hieronymus Aemilianus) was born in 1486 to a patrician family of Venice. He served as a soldier in the wars of the League of Cambrai and was captured at Castelnuovo in 1511. According to his own testimony, while a prisoner he made a vow to the Blessed Virgin Mary and was delivered. After his release he was made governor of Castelnuovo and later of Treviso, but progressively withdrew from public life to study for the priesthood. He was ordained in 1518.

The famine and plague that struck northern Italy in 1528 turned his ministry decisively to children orphaned and abandoned in the cities of the Veneto and Lombardy. He founded houses for orphans at Brescia, Bergamo, Como, Milan, and elsewhere, supported by lay collaborators. He took into his houses also the daughters of prostitutes and former prostitutes seeking new life, and reformed several hospitals. He devised, for the catechesis of children, what is among the earliest documented uses of the question-and-answer method later adopted in the Tridentine catechisms.

In 1532 at Somasca, a village in the foothills of the Alps near Bergamo, he gathered his collaborators into a community of clerics; this was the seed of the Society of the Servants of the Poor, later called the Order of Clerics Regular of Somasca (Somascan Fathers), approved by Pope Saint Pius V in 1568.

Caring for the sick during another epidemic at Somasca, he contracted the disease and died on February 8, 1537. He was beatified by Pope Benedict XIV in 1747 and canonized by Pope Clement XIII on June 16, 1767. Pope Pius XI in 1928 named him Universal Patron of Orphans and Abandoned Youth.

Jerome Emiliani's foundation answered, with that of Saint Angela Merici a few years earlier and Saint Ignatius of Loyola a generation later, a sixteenth-century crisis of urban poverty and family breakdown. His use of catechetical question-and-answer for children was an institutional innovation taken up by Tridentine catechetics. His patronage of orphans and abandoned youth, declared by Pius XI, gave universal recognition to the form of charity to which his life and death were given.

Patronages

orphans · abandoned children

Catholic Churches Named After Saint Jerome Emiliani

2 parishes on Catholic Church Times share Saint Jerome Emiliani's name. Find their Mass times, confession schedules, and adoration hours:

Sources