THE STATUARY OF ST. LEO'S CHURCH The statuary in St. Leo's Church reflects the devotion
to and love of the saints images of whom Italians from different
areas of Italy carried with them to the New World.
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St.
Rocco
Feast Day : August 16th
Patron Saint of Contagious Diseases
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This statue is located at the left rear
of the church.
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| Biography Saint Rocco, Scilla, Italy.
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According to his Acta and his vita in Legenda Aurea, he was born at Montpellier,
at that time "upon the border of France" as Legenda Aurea has
it, the son of the noble governor of that city. Even his birth was accounted
a miracle, for his noble mother had been barren until she prayed to the
Virgin Mary. Miraculously marked from birth with a red cross on his breast
that grew as he did, he early began to manifest strict asceticism and great
devoutness; on days when his "devout mother fasted twice in the week,
and the blessed child Rocke abstained him twice also, when his mother fasted
in the week, and would suck his mother but once that day".
On the death of his parents in his twentieth year he distributed all
his worldly goods among the poor like Francis of Assisi— though his father on his
deathbed had ordained him governor of Montpellier— and set out as a mendicant
pilgrim for Rome. Coming into Italy during an epidemic of plague, he was very
diligent in tending the sick in the public hospitals at Acquapendente, Cesena,
Rimini, Novara[ and Rome, and is said to have effected many miraculous cures
by prayer and the sign of the cross and the touch of his hand. At Rome, according
to Legenda Aurea he preserved the "cardinal of Angleria in Lombardy" by
making the mark of the cross on his forehead, which miraculously remained.
Ministering at Piacenza he himself finally fell ill. He was expelled from
the town; and withdrew into the forest, where he made himself a hut of boughs
and
leaves, which was miraculously supplied with water by a spring that arose
in the place; he would have perished had not a dog belonging to a nobleman
named
Gothard Palastrelli supplied him with bread and licked his wounds, healing
them. Count Gothard, following his hunting dog that carried the bread, discovered
Saint Rocco and became his acolyte.
On his return incognito to Montpellier he was arrested
as a spy (by orders of his own uncle) and thrown into prison, where he languished
five years and
died on 16 August 1327, without revealing his name, to avoid worldly glory.
(Evidence suggests, as mentioned earlier, that the previous events occurred,
instead at Voghera in 1370s). After his death, according to Legenda Aurea,
" anon an angel brought from heaven a table divinely written with letters
of gold into the prison, which he laid under the head of S. Rocke. And in that
table was written that God had granted to him his prayer, that is to wit, that
who that calleth meekly to S. Rocke he shall not be hurt with any hurt of pestilence."
The townspeople recognized him as well by his birthmark;he was soon canonized
in the popular mind, and a great church erected in veneration.
The date (1327) asserted by Francesco Diedo for Saint Rocco's death would
precede the traumatic advent of the Black Death in Europe (1347-49) after
long centuries
of absence, for which a rich iconography of the plague, its victims and its
protective saints was soon developed, in which the iconography of Roche finds
its historical place: previously the topos did not exist. In contrast, however,
Saint Rocco of Montpellier cannot be dismissed based on dates of a specific
plague event. In medieval times, the term "plague" was used to
indicate a whole array of illnesses and epidemics.
The first literary account is an undated Acta that
is labeled, by comparison with the longer, elaborated accounts that were to
follow, Acta Breviora, which
relies almost entirely on standardized hagiographic topoi to celebrate and
promote the cult of Roch
The story that when the Council of Constance was threatened with plague in
1414, public processions and prayers for the intercession of Roch were ordered,
and the outbreak ceased, is provided by Francesco Diedo, the Venetian governor
of Brescia, in his Vita Sancti Rochi, 1478. The cult of Roch gained momentum
during the bubonic plague that passed through northern Italy in 1477-79.Statue
of Saint Rocco in Bílá Hora, Prague (1751)
His popular cult, originally in central and northern
Italy and at Montpellier, spread through Spain, France, Lebanon, the Low Countries,
and Germany, where
he was often interpolated into the roster of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, whose
veneration spread in the wake of the Black Death. The magnificent 16th-century
Scuola Grande di San Rocco and the adjacent church of San Rocco were dedicated
to him by a confraternity at Venice, where his body was said to have been
surreptitiously translated and was triumphantly inaugurated in 1485; the Scuola
Grande is famous
for its sequence of paintings by Tintoretto, who painted Saint Rocco in glory
in a ceiling canvas (1564).
We know for certain that the body of Saint Rocco was carried from Voghera, instead
of Montpellier as previously thought, to Venice in 1485. Pope Alexander VI
(1492-1503) built a church and a hospital in his honor. Pope Paul III (1534-1549)
instituted a confraternity of Saint Rocco. This was raised to an arch-confraternity
in 1556 by Pope Paul IV; it still thrives today. Saint Rocco had not been
officially recognized as yet, however. In 1590 the Venetian ambassador at
Rome reported back to the Serenissima that he had been repeatedly urged to
present
the witnesses and documentation of the life and miracles of San Rocco, already
deeply entrenched in the Venetian life, because Pope Sixtus V "is strong
in his opinion either to canonize him or else to remove him from the ranks
of the saints"; the ambassador had warned a cardinal of the general
scandal that would result if the widely-venerated San Rocco were impugned
as an imposter.
Sixtus did not persue the matter but left it to later popes to proceed with
the canonization process. His successor, Pope Gregory XIV (1590-1591),
added Saint Rocco of Montpellier, who had already been memoralized in the
Holy Sacrifice of the Mass for two centuries, to the Roman Martyrology, thereby
fixing August 16th as his universal feast day.
Numerous brotherhoods have been instituted in his
honor. He is usually represented in the garb of a pilgrim, often lifting his
tunic to demonstrate the plague
sore in his thigh, and accompanied by a dog carrying a loaf in its mouth.
Saint Rocco joined Saint Gerald (San Gerardo) as a patron saint of the city
of Potenza, Italy.
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