Saint Benedict Joseph Labre

Benedict Joseph Labre was born on March 26, 1748, at Amettes, in Artois, then in the diocese of Boulogne and today in the diocese of Arras. He was the eldest of the fifteen children of Jean-Baptiste Labre and Anne Grandsire. At twelve he went to live with his uncle François-Joseph Labre, parish priest of Érin, who taught him with the priesthood in view. When this uncle died in an epidemic, he went on with his studies under a maternal uncle, the vicar of Conteville.

He wanted to enter a monastery of strict observance. The Carthusians of Val-Sainte-Aldegonde would not take him and sent him to the charterhouse of Neuville, near Montreuil, where he stayed six weeks as a postulant. La Trappe refused him twice. In November 1769 the Cistercian abbey of Sept-Fons admitted him, but his health failed after a short stay, and he was told that God wanted him elsewhere.

From then on he lived as a pilgrim on foot, a member of the Third Order of Saint Francis, begging his bread. During the first seven of his last thirteen years he visited the great shrines of Europe, among them Loreto, Assisi, Naples, Bari, Einsiedeln, Santiago de Compostela and Paray-le-Monial. He wore the same torn clothes and carried a rosary, a crucifix and a small bag with the New Testament, the Imitation of Christ and his breviary.

He spent his last six years in Rome, sleeping at times in the ruins of the Colosseum and leaving the city only for a yearly pilgrimage to Loreto. His long hours of adoration before the Blessed Sacrament exposed for the Forty Hours made him known as the saint of the Forty Hours. On April 16, 1783, the Wednesday of Holy Week, he collapsed on the steps of Santa Maria ai Monti and was carried to a house nearby, where he died that same day, at thirty-five. He was buried in Santa Maria ai Monti.

His confessor and first biographer, Marconi, recorded 136 cures attributed to him by July 6, 1783. John Thayer, an American Protestant minister who was in Rome at the time of his death, was moved by the reports of these miracles and became a Catholic. Pope Pius IX beatified Labre on May 20, 1860, and Pope Leo XIII canonized him on December 8, 1881. His tomb is in Santa Maria ai Monti in Rome. In 2012 Benedict XVI spoke of him as a saint of peace.

At Amettes the diocese of Arras receives pilgrims at his birthplace, alone or in groups, and nearly 50,000 pilgrims and visitors come to the village each year. The parish church of Saint-Sulpice, where he was baptized on March 27, 1748, keeps relics of the saint, and the diocese holds a novena in his honor at Amettes.

He is shown as a poor pilgrim in worn clothes, with a rosary, often with a tricorn hat and receiving alms, and a death mask of him survives. In the nave of Saint-Sulpice at Amettes a nineteenth-century painting, Saint Benoît Labre à Rome, listed as a historic object in 1982, shows him with his arms crossed on his chest, a rosary in his right hand and his eyes raised, before Roman ruins. A painting by Charles Demory beneath the tower of the same church shows the regional pilgrimage to Amettes of July 7, 1873.

Patron of the homeless and of itinerants, by popular tradition.

• Amettes, his birthplaceThe house where he was born in 1748, a pilgrimage house of the diocese of Arras open to individuals and groups.
• Amettes, church of Saint-SulpiceThe parish church, with a tower of 1573 and a nave rebuilt in 1622, where he was baptized and where relics of the saint are kept.
• Sept-Fons AbbeyThe Cistercian abbey of Notre-Dame de Sept-Fons, in the Allier, which received him in November 1769 and is still home to a community of monks.