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Biography

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Felix of Cantalice was born in 1515 in Cantalice, a small agricultural town in the Rieti valley of central Italy, then part of the Papal States. He belonged to a family of peasant farmers and was baptized Felice; later hagiographical tradition names his parents as Santi and Santa Porri. As a boy and young man he worked as a shepherd and farm labourer, including service on an estate near Cittaducale. Contemporary and near-contemporary accounts already present him as devout in this rural setting, attending church when he could and living a simple, penitential life. In the early 1540s, when he was in his late twenties, he asked to join the Capuchins, a strict reform of the Franciscan family that had been approved only a few years earlier and that was then spreading through the Papal States.

Admitted as a lay brother, Felix made his novitiate and profession in the Capuchin order and was never ordained to the priesthood. After a short period in houses of the order in the Roman countryside, he was sent about 1547 to the Capuchin friary in Rome, where he remained until his death some forty years later. His assigned work was that of questor, the friar who went out daily to beg food and alms for the community. He was unlettered, or nearly so, and carried out this humble office with notable cheerfulness. He greeted people with the exclamation Deo gratias (Thanks be to God), which the Romans turned into a nickname, calling him Brother Deo Gratias. He accepted both generosity and mockery, and he was known to give away to the poor much of what he had collected for the friars.

During the mid and late sixteenth century Felix became one of the best-known religious figures in the streets of Rome. He taught the catechism to children by means of simple songs and verses, and he was sought out for spiritual advice by artisans, beggars, and members of the Roman elite. He formed a close friendship with Saint Philip Neri, the founder of the Congregation of the Oratory; the two men visited one another and were associated in the popular mind as complementary types of Roman holiness, the learned priest and the illiterate lay brother. Felix was also acquainted with Saint Charles Borromeo and with several churchmen who later became popes, among them the future Sixtus V. Stories of miracles, prophecy, and extraordinary prayer circulated about him already in his lifetime, though later hagiography undoubtedly enlarged some of these episodes.

Felix died in the Capuchin house in Rome on 18 May 1587. His funeral drew large crowds, and he was buried in the order's church in the city; his relics were subsequently placed in the Church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini on the Via Veneto. Veneration began immediately. Pope Urban VIII beatified him in 1625, the first Capuchin to receive that honour. Pope Clement XI canonized him on 22 May 1712, making him the first saint of the Capuchin reform. His liturgical feast is observed on 18 May. He is the patron saint of his native town of Cantalice and has traditionally been invoked as a protector of children, in memory of the catechetical work he carried out among the young in the streets of Rome.

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