Saint Cajetan of Thiene (1480-1547)

Birth in Vicenza (1480)

Cajetan was born in Vicenza, in the territory of the Republic of Venice, in October 1480.^[7][8] He was the son of Gaspar di Thiene, lord of Thiene, and Maria Porto, both "among the first of the nobility of the territory of Vicenza".^[9] His father died while he was still a child; it was his mother, a woman of great piety, who oversaw his Christian upbringing.^[10]

The house of Thiene was old and powerful. Nothing in Cajetan's birth destined him for dispossession: everything pointed him towards a career of honours, in an Italy where, with a name and a doctor's degree, one could swiftly climb the ranks of Church and State alike.

Doctor of both laws (Padua, 1504)

Cajetan studied at the celebrated University of Padua, one of the most prestigious in Europe, where he enrolled in 1500.^[11] There, on 17 August 1504, at the age of twenty-four, he earned his doctorate in utroque iure — that is, in both civil and canon law.^[12][13][14] This double doctorate was, at the time, the key to great administrative and ecclesiastical careers. That same year he received clerical tonsure from the hands of the Bishop of Vicenza, Pietro Dandolo.^[15]

The young jurist was already a man of interior life. Tradition reports that he founded a confraternity in his city and personally served the sick. But it was in Rome that his vocation would be decided.

Protonotary of Julius II (1506)

In 1506, Cajetan went to Rome and entered the service of Pope Julius II, who appointed him apostolic protonotary.^[16][17] The office was honorary and lucrative; it placed the young man at the heart of the pontifical machine, in the most brilliant age of Renaissance Rome — the Rome of Bramante, Raphael and Michelangelo.

He is credited with a part in the reconciliation of Venice with the Holy See, at the time of the great conflicts that set the Republic against the papacy (League of Cambrai, interdict laid upon Venice).^[18] Cajetan knew both worlds; he could serve as a bridge.

The scandal of a Rome "become Babylon"

But the spectacle of the Curia wounded him. After the death of Julius II, ecclesiastical Rome appeared to him as a sick body, in which benefices, intrigues and luxury were stifling the spiritual life. In July 1517, in a letter that has remained famous, he wrote of his dismay:

"I commend to you this city, once 'holy', now Babylon, where so many venerable relics rest."^[19]

This diagnosis — a Church at once holy by its treasures and disfigured by the morals of its clerics — is exactly the one made, in that same year 1517, by an Augustinian monk of Wittenberg named Luther. But where Luther would break away, Cajetan would reform from within. That is the whole difference between heresy and holiness: the same observation, two opposite remedies.^[20][21]

A brotherhood of reforming priests

In Rome, Cajetan joined the Oratory of Divine Love (Oratorio del Divino Amore), a discreet confraternity of priests and devout lay people who, in the years 1510–1520, sought to rekindle the fervour of the clergy through prayer, frequenting the sacraments and serving the poor.^[22][23] It was there that the network of men took shape from which the Catholic Reformation would emerge: among them was Gian Pietro Carafa, Bishop of Chieti, the future Pope Paul IV.

Ordination (30 September 1516) and the Christmas vision (winter 1516–1517)

Cajetan was ordained priest on 30 September 1516, at the age of thirty-six.^[24][25] His preparation was marked by a keen sense of his own unworthiness. He wrote in his journal:

"I know it all too well, O Lord, that I am not worthy to be admitted into the company of these earthly angels."^[26]

Feeling unworthy, he delayed his first Mass by three months, wishing to celebrate it in the Roman basilica of Saint Mary Major, before the relic of the Holy Crib.^[27] It was during this first Mass, in the winter of 1516–1517, that he received, according to tradition, one of the most celebrated graces of his life: praying before the Crib, he is said to have received the Christ Child from the hands of the Virgin, in a mystical embrace.^[28][29] Theatine tradition places this first Mass and this vision in the night of Christmas 1516; the account relayed by EWTN dates them to the Epiphany, 6 January 1517.^[30] From this Marian grace he kept a filial devotion whose spirit he summed up thus:

"Through her, I was loved, raised up and clothed."^[31]

At the bedside of the incurably ill

The death of his mother, in 1517, brought Cajetan back to his native Veneto. Even before founding a hospital, he joined two confraternities of devout laymen: the Company of Saints Clement and Jerome in Vicenza, on 9 January 1519, then the Secret Company of the Holy Body of Christ in Verona, on 10 July 1519.^[32] There he devoted himself to the most repellent cases among the sick. He founded a hospital for the incurably ill in Vicenza in 1522, then worked on a similar foundation in Venice around 1523, where he met Saint Jerome Emiliani, the future founder of the Somaschans: Cajetan would remain one of the advisers of his congregation, canonically instituted in 1534.^[33][34][35]

There a conviction took shape that would never leave him: charity is not a feeling, but an act. His thought, paraphrased, comes down to two ideas: in the oratory, one serves God through worship, while at the hospital, one truly finds Him; and it is acts of love, not feelings, that purify souls.^[36]

To serve the incurably ill was, for him, to touch Christ in person — not to imagine Him, but to find Him.

Four men, one project of reform

On 14 September 1524, the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, Cajetan and three companions pronounced their vows in Rome and founded an institute of an entirely new kind: the Clerks Regular.^[37][38] His companions were Gian Pietro Carafa, Bishop of Chieti — whose city, Teate in Latin, would give the order its name: the Theatines —, Bonifacio da Colle and Paolo Consiglieri.^[39][40] Pope Clement VII approved the foundation with the bull Exponi nobis of 24 June 1524.^[41]

The innovation was radical. Until then, people knew monks (who live in the cloister) and regular canons. The Theatines were secular priests living in community under religious vows, devoted to the active ministry: preaching, the sacraments, care of the sick, reform of the diocesan clergy. They inaugurated the great family of clerks regular to which the Jesuits, the Barnabites and the Somaschans would later belong.^[42][43]

The wager of Providence

The most disconcerting trait of the first Theatines was their absolute poverty. Not only did they renounce all property, they refused all fixed income, all assured revenue — and even begging. They lived solely on the spontaneous alms that divine Providence sent them, without asking for anything.^[44][45]

This choice was not ascetic bravado: it was a profession of faith. By refusing even to beg, Cajetan wanted to make his whole congregation a living demonstration of the Gospel word: seek first the Kingdom of God, and all the rest will be given to you besides. Hence his title of "Father of Providence".^[46][47]

In May 1527, the imperial troops of Charles V, largely composed of Lutheran Landsknechte, swept down on Rome and sacked it with unheard-of violence. The Theatines, then lodging in a house near the Vatican, were taken for wealthy prelates. Cajetan was tortured by the soldiers, convinced that he was hiding a treasure — he had literally nothing to hand over.^[61][62]

The little community, ruined and threatened, managed to flee to Venice, welcomed by the Republic.^[63] For Cajetan, the ordeal paradoxically confirmed his intuition: a man who owns nothing can lose nothing. Providence had led him, through the worst, to a new field of apostolate.

A centre of reform at San Paolo Maggiore

In 1533, Cajetan was sent as superior to found the house of Naples, where he would spend the last fourteen years of his life.^[64][65] The community first settled at Santa Maria della Misericordia, then at the hospital of the Incurables, before moving, from May 1538 onwards, to the church of San Paolo Maggiore, which became a true centre of the Catholic Reformation in southern Italy: fervent preaching, intense sacramental life, formation of an exemplary clergy.^[66][67] On 14 September 1534, Cajetan succeeded Carafa as provost general — major superior — of the Theatine order.^[68]

Naples was then traversed by new ideas. There Cajetan confronted the spread of Protestantism, notably the influence of Juan de Valdés and of the preacher Bernardino Ochino — the famous Capuchin who would end up going over to the Reformation and fleeing.^[69] Against this current, Cajetan set less polemics than holiness of life and Eucharistic fervour: he restored the frequenting of the sacraments, encouraged frequent communion and devotion to the crib.^[70][71]

The monte di pietà and the birth of the Banco di Napoli

One of his Neapolitan works had an unexpected posterity. To wrest the poor from the claws of usurers, Cajetan supported the creation of a monte di pietà (monte di pietà), a charitable credit institution lending without interest against pledges.^[72][73] From this charitable establishment would emerge, through successive filiations, the Banco di Napoli, one of the oldest banks in the world.^[74] Theatine tradition itself specifies that Cajetan took part in it only indirectly, by inspiring and supporting devout laymen who carried the project forward.^[75]

That the "Father of Providence" should be associated with the origin of a bank is no irony: it is the same charity, seeking by every means — including economic ones — to protect the little ones. Hence his modern patronage of the unemployed, of workers and even of honest bankers.^[76] In Naples, Cajetan also directed spiritually the Dominican monastery of Sapienza, became corrector of the Confraternity of the Whites of Justice, which assisted those condemned to death, and supported Maria Lorenza Longo in the foundation, in 1535, of the monastery of Santa Maria di Gerusalemme of the Capuchin Poor Clares.^[77]

A burning devotion to the Eucharist and to Providence

The heart of Cajetan's spirituality was Eucharistic. His whole reform of the clergy aimed at restoring to priests the sense of the mystery they celebrate: for him, the liturgy was not a formality, but the real encounter with the living God. His confidence in Providence came down to a single attitude: to ask everything of God, to hoard nothing, to live day by day on what Heaven sends.^[78]

Cajetan's last years were darkened by the political troubles of Naples: riots against the introduction of the Spanish Inquisition, bloody clashes. The old priest suffered from them as from a personal wound; tradition says he died of grief at the discords of his city.^[79]

On his deathbed, when they wanted to soften his couch, he refused and asked to suffer in imitation of the Crucified:

"My Saviour died on a cross. Let me at least die upon wood."^[80]

He died on 7 August 1547, in Naples, at the age of sixty-six. He was buried in the church of San Paolo Maggiore, where his relics still rest.^[81][82] His contemporaries spoke of a kind of mystical crucifixion experienced in his final moments, as if the man who had given everything was completing his offering by uniting himself to the Passion.^[83]

From beatification to canonization (1629–1671)

Cajetan's cause for sainthood progressed at the pace of his order's expansion. He was beatified on 8 October 1629 by Pope Urban VIII, then canonized on 12 April 1671 by Pope Clement X.^[84][85] His feast was fixed on 7 August, the day of his death.

The "hunter of souls" and Father of Providence

The nickname that has stayed attached to Cajetan is that of cacciatore d'anime, the "hunter of souls": a priest who tirelessly tracks down sinners to bring them back to God, never despairing of anyone.^[86] But it is under the title of Father of Providence that he is most universally prayed to. Because he lived owning nothing, abandoning himself entirely to Heaven, the Christian people made him the patron of those who lack everything: the unemployed, those without work, those seeking their bread.^[87][88][89]

San Cayetano: patron of bread and work in Argentina

Nowhere is devotion to Cajetan more alive than in Argentina, where he is honoured under the name of San Cayetano and invoked as patron of bread and work (pan y trabajo).^[90][91] Every 7 August, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims flock to his sanctuary in Liniers, Buenos Aires, carrying ears of wheat symbolising daily bread, to ask for employment and entrust their difficulties to the saint of Providence. It is one of the largest popular gatherings of Latin American Catholicism.

This massive cult is no sentimental deviation: it extends exactly the founder's intuition. The man who had refused even to beg, so as to depend only on God, has become, by a just return, the recourse of the most destitute.

The life of Cajetan of Thiene comes down to one central intuition, running through the whole Catholic Reformation: the Church is not saved by leaving it, but by becoming holy within it. At the very moment when the Protestant Reformation was tearing Christendom apart in the name of Roman corruption, Cajetan made the same diagnosis — "Rome become Babylon" — and chose the opposite path: reform through holiness, not through schism.

Three lessons remain. First, abandonment to Providence: not as recklessness, but as an act of faith verified in a whole life without safety net or income. Second, real charity: at the hospital, one truly finds God — holiness is not a feeling, but acts performed at the bedside of the most rejected. Third, love of the Eucharist and of the liturgy celebrated with reverence, against the routine that eats away at priests' faith.

He thus joins the cohort of the great Catholic reformers of the sixteenth century — Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Saint John of God, Saint Jerome Emiliani — to whom the Council of Trent would soon give its charter. But Cajetan was there before the Council: a silent forerunner who had understood, as early as 1524, that the reform of the Church would begin with the reform of the priest.

• On the co-founder turned pope: Pope Paul IV (Carafa), co-founder of the Theatines and formidable reformer.
• On the great movement to which his work belongs: The Catholic Reformation and the Council of Trent.
• On the crisis that provoked this reform: The Protestant Reformation.
• On the other founding saints of the same generation: Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Saint John of God and Saint Jerome Emiliani.