Saint Roch

Roch is known through a short early Life, the Acta Breviora, and through the Life written in 1478 by the Venetian Francesco Diedo, and the sources disagree on his dates. The Catholic Encyclopedia, following the older tradition, has him born about 1295 and dead in 1327. The tourist office of Montpellier today gives a birth about 1349 and a death at Voghera, in Lombardy, on August 16, 1379.

According to his Lives, he was born at Montpellier into a wealthy family. Left an orphan in his youth, he gave his goods to the poor and set out on pilgrimage to Rome. In Italy he cared for the victims of plague in towns such as Acquapendente and Cesena, and in Rome itself.

At Piacenza he caught the plague and withdrew into a wood. The legend tells that a dog brought him bread each day and licked his sores, and that a man named Gothard found him and cared for him. Healed, he set out for home. In Lombardy, at a time when two popes divided Christendom, he was taken for a spy and held at Voghera for five years, and he made himself known only on the eve of his death. The older version of the story places his imprisonment and death at Montpellier.

Roch was never canonized by a formal process. By Diedo’s account, the Council of Constance ordered public prayers in his honor when plague struck the city in 1414. According to the city’s tourist office, Montpellier dedicated a chapel to him in 1420. In 1485 his body was carried from Voghera to Venice, and since March 3, 1490, it has rested in the church of San Rocco, beside the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Pope Urban VIII approved his cult as immemorial, by a decree the Scuola dates to 1625, and approved an office for his feast.

At Montpellier the Trinitarians received a relic from the confraternity of Arles in 1616, and in the nineteenth century Venice gave a tibia. Fragments of the tibia and of his pilgrim’s staff are kept today in the church of Saint-Roch, a neo-Gothic building by the city architect Jean Cassan, whose first stone was laid in 1860, blessed in 1867 and never finished. On August 16 the priest blesses the faithful and their animals in front of the church, and the city holds processions. In New Orleans, Father Peter Leonard Thevis, who credited Saint Roch with protecting his parish in the yellow fever epidemic of 1867, built the St. Roch Chapel, dedicated on August 16, 1876; restored in 2022, it serves as the National Shrine of St. Roch.

Roch is shown as a pilgrim with a broad hat, a staff and a scallop shell, lifting his tunic to show the plague sore on his thigh, with a dog at his feet carrying a loaf. In the church of Saint-Roch at Montpellier, Auguste-Barthélémy Glaize painted the scenes of his life in the choir, among them Saint Roch Giving His Goods to the Poor, dated 1839, and a statue of the saint in the church is said to bear the features of the painter Frédéric Bazille. In Venice the Scuola Grande di San Rocco keeps the cycle of paintings by Tintoretto, two of them devoted to the saint.

Invoked against plague and contagious diseases, and patron of pilgrims.

• Montpellier, church of Saint-RochThe church on the Place Saint-Roch, a stage of the Via Tolosana to Compostela, which keeps relics of his tibia and pilgrim’s staff in one of its chapels.
• Montpellier, 19 bis rue de la LogeThe house where tradition places his family’s home, with a small statue of the saint on the facade and a well that can be seen when the shop on the ground floor is open.
• Montpellier, Notre-Dame des TablesThe former chapel of the Jesuit college on the rue du Collège, which keeps a painting and other works devoted to Saint Roch.