Benedict Joseph Labre

Benedict Joseph Labre was born on 26 March 1748 in the village of Amettes in Artois, in the Kingdom of France, the eldest of the fifteen children of Jean-Baptiste Labre and Anne Grandsire. His family were modest rural shopkeepers of solid piety. From childhood he showed an unusual attraction to prayer, silence, and self-denial. He was sent to live with an uncle who was parish priest at Erin, where he received a rudimentary classical and religious education intended to prepare him for the priesthood, and he later studied with another priest-uncle. He made his First Communion in adolescence and thereafter became increasingly absorbed by the desire for a strictly contemplative life rather than a secular clerical career.

In the late 1760s he sought admission to several of the most austere houses of the Carthusian and Cistercian traditions. He applied to the Carthusians at Longuenesse, then to the Trappist abbey of La Trappe, to the Cistercians of Sept-Fons, and again to the Carthusians at Neuville-sous-Montreuil. In each case he was either refused profession or dismissed after a short postulancy or novitiate, generally because of fragile health, limited formal education, or an apparent unsuitability for the common life of a monastery. These repeated failures, which he accepted as a sign of God's will rather than as a reason to abandon religious aspiration, led him away from cloistered life toward a different form of vocation.

From about 1770 he embraced the life of a perpetual pilgrim and beggar. He traveled on foot across France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and the German lands, visiting major shrines including Loreto, Assisi, Bari, Santiago de Compostela, and Einsiedeln, as well as the basilicas of Rome. He eventually made Rome his principal residence, sleeping in the ruins of the Colosseum or in neglected corners of the city, living entirely on alms, and wearing a single set of ragged clothes. He was received into the Third Order of Saint Francis. Observers noted his extreme poverty, his indifference to vermin and filth, his long hours of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, and his frequent attendance at Mass; some regarded him as a holy man, others as a madman or a nuisance.

In his final years he was a familiar figure in the churches of Rome, especially Santa Maria ai Monti. On 16 April 1783, during Holy Week, he collapsed on the steps of that church after the liturgy and was carried into a neighboring house, where he died the same evening at the age of thirty-five. Popular veneration began at once. He was beatified by Pope Pius IX on 20 May 1860 and canonized by Pope Leo XIII on 8 December 1881. His relics are enshrined in Santa Maria ai Monti. He is invoked as a patron of the homeless, beggars, pilgrims, unmarried men, and people suffering from mental illness, and is remembered as an exemplar of evangelical poverty and hidden holiness in the eighteenth-century Catholic world.