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Biography

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Albert of Trapani, also known as Albert of Sicily and in Italian as Alberto degli Abati, was a Carmelite friar and priest of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. He was born in Trapani, a port on the western coast of Sicily, then part of the Kingdom of Sicily, into the noble family of the degli Abati. No contemporary document preserves an exact year of birth; later tradition placed it in the middle of the thirteenth century. Hagiographical accounts, which cannot be confirmed from independent records, relate that his parents had been childless for many years and that his mother promised to dedicate a son to the Blessed Virgin Mary and to the Carmelite Order, which had only recently established houses in the Latin West after leaving Mount Carmel. Whether or not that vow is historical, Albert entered the Carmelite community in Trapani while still young and was formed in the mix of eremitical prayer and mendicant preaching that marked the order in its first generations in Europe.

He was ordained a priest and spent his working life in Sicily, where the Carmelites had convents in Trapani, Messina, Palermo, and other towns. He acquired a reputation as an eloquent preacher and as a man of prayer and penance. Carmelite sources later claimed that he served as prior provincial of Sicily, visiting the houses of the province and promoting regular observance. He is associated especially with Messina, where he is said to have preached and to have resided for a time. Medieval and early modern legendaries attribute to him numerous conversions, including of Jews in Sicily, as well as exorcisms and miraculous healings, particularly of fevers. One cycle of stories presents him as a wonder-worker who multiplied food for the poor or for his brethren. These narratives belong to the common stock of mendicant hagiography and should be treated with caution as historical evidence; they do, however, attest to a strong local and order-wide conviction of his holiness within a few generations of his death.

Albert died at Messina on 7 August 1307 and was buried in the church of the Carmelites there. Pilgrimage and liturgical cult developed around his tomb. In the fifteenth century the Carmelite Order, then spreading his fame beyond Sicily, obtained papal approval of his public veneration. Pope Sixtus IV is generally credited with confirming the cult in 1476, an act that later Catholic practice has regarded as equivalent to canonization. Relics associated with him were subsequently translated, and Trapani became the chief center of his devotion, with a basilica there bearing his name. The Carmelite liturgical calendar and the Roman Martyrology assign his feast to 7 August.

In art he is typically shown in the Carmelite habit, often with a white cloak, holding a lily as a sign of chastity, a book, or a crucifix, and sometimes trampling a demon in reference to his fame as an exorcist. He is the principal patron of the city of Trapani and is invoked by the Carmelites as a patron of their schools and studies. Because of the story of his own conception after long sterility, he has also been invoked by couples hoping for children. His historical figure remains that of an early Sicilian Carmelite whose documented biography is thin, but whose cult has been continuous in Sicily and in the Carmelite Order from the later Middle Ages to the present.

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