Confessor Jerome Miani

Jerome Miani, known in Italian as Gerolamo Emiliani (or Miani) and in Latin as Hieronymus Aemilianus, was a Venetian nobleman of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries who became a priest and the founder of a religious congregation devoted to the care of orphans. He was born in Venice in 1486 into a patrician family. In early adulthood he followed a military career typical of Venetian nobles of his generation and, during the wars that followed the League of Cambrai, held command of a fortress on the Venetian mainland, Castelnuovo di Quero. In 1511 the fortress fell and he was taken prisoner. Confined in a dungeon, he underwent a religious conversion; he later attributed his liberation to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and returned to Venice a changed man.

After his release he took responsibility for relatives, including the orphaned children of a brother, and prepared for holy orders. He was ordained a priest in 1518. Northern Italy in the 1520s and 1530s was repeatedly struck by famine, war, and epidemic disease. Miani responded by gathering abandoned children, opening orphanages and hospitals, and organizing relief in Venice and then in Verona, Brescia, Bergamo, Como, Milan, and other cities of the region. He insisted that the children in his care receive both Christian instruction and training in a trade, so that they might later support themselves rather than remain dependent.

In 1532, at Somasca near Bergamo, he formed his collaborators into a community that developed into the Clerics Regular of Somasca, commonly called the Somaschi or Somascan Fathers. The institute was dedicated to the education of poor and orphaned youth, the care of the sick, and pastoral work among the destitute. Miani himself lived in severe personal austerity and continued to serve the sick and the poor directly. While nursing victims of an epidemic at Somasca he contracted the illness and died there on 8 February 1537.

Devotion to him spread in the centuries after his death. He was beatified by Pope Benedict XIV in 1747 and canonized by Pope Clement XIII in 1767. The General Roman Calendar keeps his feast on 8 February. In 1928 Pope Pius XI declared him the universal patron of orphans and abandoned children. His relics are venerated at Somasca, and the Somaschi Fathers continue schools and charitable works in continuity with the foundations he established in sixteenth-century northern Italy.