Saint Fabiola

Saint Fabiola was a fourth-century Roman matron of the patrician gens Fabia, one of Rome’s oldest noble houses. Almost nothing is known of her childhood, and no reliable source records the year of her birth. The principal ancient witness to her life is Saint Jerome, who commemorated her in a letter to the Roman cleric Oceanus written shortly after she died. In youth she was given in marriage to a husband whose vices and cruelty Jerome describes in strong terms. Under Roman civil law she obtained a divorce, a remedy then available to citizens of the Empire but at odds with the Church’s teaching that a valid Christian marriage could not be dissolved.

While her first husband still lived, Fabiola entered a second marriage. After that second husband died, she submitted to public penance for having contracted a union the Church regarded as adulterous. Jerome recounts that she took her place among the penitents in the Lateran Basilica, in coarse penitential dress, and was reconciled before the Christian people of Rome by the city’s bishop. From that time she embraced an austere and charitable life. She liquidated property to relieve the poor and, in a work Jerome presents as new to the Latin West, established a hospital (nosocomium) at Rome in which she gathered the sick from the streets and herself attended even the most disfigured and contagious among them.

Fabiola belonged to the group of aristocratic Roman women—including Saint Marcella and Saint Paula—who had been drawn to scriptural study and asceticism during Jerome’s residence in Rome in the 380s. About the mid-390s she travelled to Bethlehem, lived for a time in the monastic community associated with Jerome and Paula, and received instruction in the Scriptures. Disturbed by reports that the Huns threatened the eastern provinces, and perhaps finding the monastic routine of the East uncongenial, she returned to Italy. There, together with the senator Saint Pammachius, she founded a xenodochium, a hospice for strangers and pilgrims, at Portus, the harbour city at the mouth of the Tiber.

She died at Rome in 399. Jerome describes her funeral as a great civic occasion, attended by crowds from every class, a sign of the reputation her charity had won. The Church has venerated her as a saint from an early date; her traditional feast day is 27 December. Later devotion has invoked her especially for those in broken or painful marriages, for widows, and for the care of the sick, in memory of her own history of marital failure, public repentance, and hospital work.