Bernardine

Bernardine of Siena, born Bernardino degli Albizzeschi in 1380 at Massa Marittima in Tuscany, came from a noble Sienese family; his father had served as governor of that town. Orphaned of both parents while still a child, he was raised in Siena by relatives who gave him a careful religious and legal education. He studied civil and canon law and, as a young man during the plague that struck Siena around 1400, spent months nursing the sick at the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala. After a period of prayer and withdrawal he entered the Observant Franciscans in the first years of the fifteenth century and was ordained a priest.

From about 1417 he became one of the most celebrated itinerant preachers in Italy. For more than two decades he traveled through Tuscany, Lombardy, the Veneto, Umbria, and the Kingdom of Naples, addressing huge crowds in city squares. His sermons denounced usury, luxury, gambling, superstition, and the factional violence of Guelfs and Ghibellines, and he pressed for civic peace and moral reform. He is especially remembered for promoting devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus, displaying a tablet painted with the trigram IHS set in a sunburst, a emblem later copied on churches, civic buildings, and personal objects across the peninsula.

The Holy Name devotion and the intensity of his preaching drew accusations of heresy and idolatry. He was summoned to Rome, examined, and cleared, with support from Pope Martin V and later Pope Eugene IV. He refused several episcopal sees, including Siena, Ferrara, and Urbino, preferring the itinerant apostolate. As a leading figure among the Observant Franciscans he encouraged stricter living of the Rule of Saint Francis and helped the Observant reform grow within the order.

Bernardine died on 20 May 1444 at L'Aquila while on a preaching journey and was buried there; a basilica was later built over his tomb. Pope Nicholas V canonized him in 1450, only six years after his death. Later tradition has invoked him as patron of advertisers and of those who work in communications and public relations, of Italy, of L'Aquila and Massa Marittima, of people with respiratory ailments (a patronage linked to the strain his voice endured in preaching), and of those struggling with compulsive gambling. His feast is kept on 20 May.