Saint Cajetan

Gaetano dei Conti di Thiene, known in English as Saint Cajetan, was born in 1480 in Vicenza, then a city of the Republic of Venice, to the noble Thiene family. His father, Count Gasparo di Thiene, died while Cajetan was still a small child, and he was raised by his mother, Maria da Porto, in a devout household. He studied civil and canon law at the University of Padua and received doctorates in both. He then went to Rome and was appointed a protonotary apostolic at the papal court under Pope Julius II. Despite this comfortable ecclesiastical office, he was drawn toward a stricter evangelical life of prayer and charity.

He was ordained a priest in 1516. In Rome he took part in the Oratory of Divine Love, a confraternity of clergy and laity devoted to personal holiness, frequent reception of the sacraments, and care of the sick and poor. He also founded or supported hospitals in Vicenza, Venice, and Rome, giving special attention to people suffering from incurable and socially stigmatized diseases. Traditional hagiography portrays him as a man of intense Eucharistic and Marian devotion and records a Christmas vision in which the Virgin Mary placed the Infant Jesus in his arms.

Alarmed by worldliness and poor formation among much of the early sixteenth-century clergy, Cajetan sought a more radical reform of priestly life. In 1524, together with Gian Pietro Carafa (bishop of Chieti, later Pope Paul IV), Paolo Consiglieri, and Bonifacio da Colle, he founded the Congregation of Clerics Regular, popularly called the Theatines after Carafa’s see of Theate (Chieti). The community combined the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience with an active apostolate of preaching, sacramental ministry, and care of the sick, while living in common without fixed revenues and relying on alms. Pope Clement VII approved the congregation. The Theatines were intended as a living model of reformed clerical life in the decades before the Council of Trent.

During the Sack of Rome in 1527 Cajetan and his companions were imprisoned and mistreated by imperial troops before finding refuge in Venice. He later worked in Verona and then settled in Naples, where he established a Theatine house and spent his remaining years. In Naples he continued to serve the poor and helped promote a monte di pietà, a charitable pawn institution meant to protect the needy from usury. He died in Naples in 1547. He was beatified by Pope Urban VIII in 1629 and canonized by Pope Clement X in 1671. His feast is kept on 7 August. Popular devotion, especially strong in Argentina and other parts of Latin America, invokes him as a helper of the unemployed and of those seeking honest work.