Gerolamo Emiliani

Gerolamo Emiliani, also known as Jerome Emiliani or Girolamo Miani, was born in 1486 in Venice to a patrician family of the Republic of Venice. His father was Angelo Emiliani (Miani) and his mother Eleonore Mauroceni. In his youth he followed a military career in Venetian service. During the War of the League of Cambrai he served as a captain and was given command of the fortress of Castelnuovo (Quero) in the Trevisan hinterland. Captured by enemy forces around 1511, he was confined in a dungeon, where he underwent a religious conversion. He attributed his escape to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and afterward hung his prison chains as a votive offering in the church of the Madonna Grande at Treviso.

Returning to Venice, he took charge of the education of his nephews after a brother's death and turned to a life of prayer and study. He was ordained a priest in 1518. In the late 1520s war, famine, and plague struck northern Italy. Emiliani gave himself to the care of the sick, the poor, and especially orphaned and abandoned children in Venice. He gathered homeless children, housed and fed them, taught them Christian doctrine, and established charitable houses for their support. He later carried this work to other cities of the region, including Verona, Brescia, Bergamo, Como, and Milan, founding orphanages, hospitals, and places of refuge.

In 1532, at the village of Somasca near Bergamo, he founded a community of priests and lay brothers devoted to the care of orphans, the education of the poor, and service to the sick. This company, known as the Servants of the Poor, became the Congregation of the Clerics Regular of Somasca, commonly called the Somaschi Fathers. The congregation received papal approval after his death and was later raised to the status of clerks regular. Emiliani was among the first in his time to use a question-and-answer catechism in the religious instruction of children and is regarded as a pioneer of organized orphan care and free schooling for the poor in early modern Italy.

While tending victims of an epidemic at Somasca, he contracted the plague and died there on 8 February 1537. He was beatified by Pope Benedict XIV in 1747 and canonized by Pope Clement XIII on 16 July 1767. His feast is kept on 8 February. In 1928 Pope Pius XI declared him patron saint of orphans and abandoned youth. His relics are venerated at the sanctuary dedicated to him in Somasca, in present-day Vercurago in Lombardy.