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Biography

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Amato Ronconi was born in 1226 in Saludecio, a town in Romagna in the Papal States, in what is now the province of Rimini in northern Italy. He came from a family of some means. His parents died while he was still young, and he was raised in the household of his elder brother Giacomo. Traditional accounts of his life relate that relations with his sister-in-law became difficult, and that this domestic conflict led him to leave the family home, to give his share of the inheritance to the poor, and to take up a life of penance. He joined the Third Order of Saint Francis, the lay branch of the Franciscan movement, which allowed him to live according to a Franciscan rule while remaining in the secular state rather than entering a friary.

Pilgrimage was the distinctive mark of his spiritual life. According to the consistent tradition of his cult, he traveled four times from Romagna to the shrine of the apostle James at Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. In the thirteenth century that journey was long, costly, and hazardous, and completing it repeatedly points to a spirituality shaped by the medieval ideal of the pilgrim. Those journeys appear to have inspired the main work of his later years. Back in Saludecio he used what remained of his property to found a hospice for the poor and for pilgrims, remembered as a hospital under the patronage of the Virgin Mary. He himself served there, offering food, lodging, and care to the sick and to travelers without charge, in keeping with the Franciscan emphasis on minority and hospitality.

Ronconi spent his last years in the hospice he had established, living among those he served rather than withdrawing into a cloister. He died in Saludecio on 8 May 1292. Veneration at his tomb began locally and continued for centuries. His relics were preserved and are kept in the church of San Biagio in Saludecio. The Holy See recognized the longstanding cult when Pope Pius VI beatified him in 1776. A miracle attributed to his intercession in the modern period allowed the cause to proceed, and Pope Francis canonized him on 23 November 2014 in Saint Peter's Square. The Catholic Church keeps his feast on 8 May, the traditional anniversary of his death. He is the patron saint of his native town of Saludecio.

The historical record of his life is thin, as is typical for a thirteenth-century lay tertiary of local rather than international fame. He left no writings. What can be said with reasonable confidence is that a man of this name, associated with Saludecio, the Franciscan Third Order, repeated pilgrimage to Compostela, and a hospice for the poor, was venerated from the later Middle Ages, and that this cult received successive papal confirmations culminating in canonization in 2014.

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