Peter Costello
The shrine of St Roch in Venice Mainly About Books
by the Books Editor
In times of crisis it’s natural that people should look to their Faith for reassurance. During the days of the ‘mad cow disease’ (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) the prayer in time of plague associated with St Roch was much sought. Now, with a new kind of plague striking fear into the nation, it is being requested again.
So what is the story of St Roch and his prayer? In 1414, during the course of the deliberations of the Council of Constance, the German city on the shores of Lake Constance, the plague broke out in the city. The Council ordered public services in St Roch’s honour, the saint having been long associated with relief in times of plague. The plague faded, and devotion to the saint spread across Europe.
Pope Paul III instituted a confraternity of St Roch, one of a number that were part of the Counter-Reformation initiated after the Council of Trent.
From then on the confraternities spread and the devotion to St Roch developed. He was the focus of popular novenas and prayers.
The story of the devotion to the saint in recent centuries is clear enough. But the life of the saint himself belongs to the Middle Ages of the Golden Legend and is a most confusing matter, as is the case with many saints before the time of Urban VIII, and the later researches of modern hagiographers.
He soon passed on to visit other cities and Rome. Everywhere his apparent holiness seemed to abate the disease as he spread his example of Christian care”
The tradition was that he was born in Montpellier in the south of France around 1295 and that he died there in 1327. The city at this time was a possession of Aragon, and was quite the most important city in the Occitanie region.
St Roch had a livid red cross as a birth mark. His parents died when he was twenty. He gave up his rich inheritance to the poor, and set out as a simple pilgrim to visit Rome; but made a stay at Aquapendente, a plague-ridden commune in Lazio. He devoted himself to the care of the stricken whom he blessed with a sign of the cross.
Disease
He soon passed on to visit other cities and Rome. Everywhere his apparent holiness seemed to abate the disease as he spread his example of Christian care.
At Piacenza in the north of Italy, becoming infected, he retreated into ‘self-isolation’ in a forest hut. There, again according to The Golden Legend, he was brought a daily supply of bread. St Roch is now the patron saint of dogs, hence his companion in pictures is a hound with a loaf in its mouth.
Recovering at last, he was said to have returned to Montpellier. As he refused to tell the authorities who he was, he was thrown into prison by order (some say) of his uncle the governor. There he lingered to death for five years.
The famous birthmark of the cross was then uncovered and he was acclaimed, not only for who he was, but as a popular saint. He was given a public funeral, and many miracles were inevitably attributed to his intervention.
Robbery
Some scholars now think that all this happened in fact at Voghera, in Savoy. from where a little over half a century later in 1485, the agents of Doge stole his relics, where he had come to be buried and carried them away to Venice where he is now enshrined. Such pious robbery was a habit of that powerful city which had already removed the relics of St Mark, its own patron saint, from Egypt.
There is an Irish literary angle to the legend of St Roch. In Luke Wadding’s Annales Minorum (Rome, 1731), an essential work on the early history of the Franciscans, there is an account of St Roch, who some thought was member of the Third Order of St Francis – though this is still an open question.
Wadding, an important scholar in the Irish tradition, remains, after the Golden Legend, a prime source for the life of St Roch.
Currently the Diocese of Cork and Ross and the parish of Greystones are both promoting payers to St Roch as part of their spiritual support to the Faithful in this present time of plague. Others will doubtless follow.