Saint Gerard Majella (1726-1755)

Birth and Family at Muro Lucano (1726)

Gerard Majella was born on 6 April 1726 at Muro Lucano, a small mountain town some hundred kilometres east of Naples (about fifty miles according to the Catholic Encyclopedia), in what is today Basilicata.^[8][9] He was the youngest of five children in a modest and deeply Christian family. His father, Domenico Maiella, was a tailor ; his mother, Benedetta Galella, raised her children in a simple, unadorned piety.^[10]

The child was of fragile health from birth — a weak constitution that never left him and prepared his early death.^[11] Very early on, he showed a singular attraction to the Eucharist. Tradition reports that he often went to pray in a chapel near Muro, at Capotignano, where, it is said, a statue of the Christ Child held out a small loaf to him : a popular image that speaks less of a verifiable prodigy than of little Gerard's familiarity with Christ.^[12][13]

"It is in God and in God alone that I trust and I hope. In His Hands I have placed my whole life that He may do with me that which He pleases." — Saint Gerard Majella, in his written resolutions^[14]

The Father's Death and the Apprentice Tailor

The death of Domenico Maiella, while Gerard was still only a child, plunged the family into poverty.^[15] To keep him alive, his mother placed him as an apprentice with a master tailor. Gerard learned the trade and kept it all his life ; but the workshop was also his first school of patience for him : while the master liked him, the foreman treated him harshly, sometimes beating him soundly.^[16][17] The child bore this ill-treatment without complaint, already seeing in unjust suffering a likeness to the humiliated Christ.

The Servant of the Bishop of Lacedonia

His reverence for the priesthood and his taste for suffering then led him to enter the service of a prelate, the Bishop of Lacedonia, reputed to be of a difficult temper and almost impossible to satisfy.^[18][19] For about three years, the young man endured the moods of this demanding master with an unfailing gentleness, seeing in it a providence for mortifying himself. On the bishop's death, Gerard returned to his tailor's trade, working first as a journeyman, then on his own account.^[20]

God's Tailor : Sharing His Earnings

Now an independent craftsman, Gerard adopted a rule of life of radical detachment. The Catholic Encyclopedia notes that he divided his earnings into three parts : one for his mother, one for the poor, and a third in offerings for the souls in purgatory.^[21] This spontaneous charity, which left almost nothing for himself, already foreshadowed the title popular devotion would later give him : Father of the Poor. The tailor of Muro did not hoard : he gave, prayed, fasted and kept vigil.^[22]

The Closed Door of the Capuchins

Gerard's soul was set on one thing alone : giving himself entirely to God in religious life. He knocked at the door of the Capuchins, where an uncle was a friar ; but his delicate health and youth earned him a refusal.^[23][24] The cloister door closed. As with his contemporary Benedict Joseph Labre, several times turned away from austere orders, this refusal was not the failure of a vocation but the mysterious detour by which God led it elsewhere. Gerard would wait for the decisive opportunity : the coming to Muro of the missionaries of Saint Alphonsus.

"Mother, I Am Leaving to Become a Saint"

In the spring of 1749, the Redemptorists preached a mission at Muro Lucano. Gerard was seized by it. He begged the Fathers to admit him ; faced with his frail appearance, they hesitated and first entrusted him to his mother. According to his biographer, his mother and sister, fearing to lose him, locked him in his room ; but the young man cut up his bedsheets, climbed down through the window and left to join the missionaries, leaving on his bed a note saying he had gone away to make himself a saint.^[25]

The Fathers, struck by his perseverance, sent him to the superior with these words : "I am sending you a useless brother" — so little robust did Gerard appear. Events would belie the judgement : this "useless brother" would become the marvel of the Congregation.^[26][27]

At the Heart of the Community : "The Father of the Poor"

Received as a lay brother, Gerard successively filled the humblest posts in the house. The Catholic Encyclopedia lists his offices : he was in turn gardener, sacristan, tailor, porter, cook, carpenter, and foreman of the works on the new buildings at Caposele.^[28][29] "Weak in body, he did the work of three," writes his encyclopaedic biographer, and his overflowing charity toward the destitute earned him the title of "Father of the Poor."^[30]

He is credited with a saying, which his biographies do not report as such but which sums up his teaching : God alone can give peace, and the world has never been able to satisfy the heart.^[31]

Profession and the Vow of Perfection (1752)

After his novitiate at Deliceto, Gerard pronounced his religious vows on 16 July 1752.^[32] At that moment, he added to the three ordinary vows of poverty, chastity and obedience an extraordinary private vow : always to do what seemed to him the most perfect.^[33] This vow, of vertiginous exactingness, holds the key to his whole life : for him it was not enough not to sin — at every moment he wanted to choose the best. From this was born his famous obedience.

The "Miracle of Obedience" According to Saint Alphonsus

Saint Alphonsus Liguori, who then governed the Congregation, saw in Gerard a "miracle of obedience."^[34] The most astonishing trait is reported by the encyclopaedist : Gerard "obeyed not only the orders of his superiors when present, but, even when absent, he knew and fulfilled their wishes."^[35] Obedience in him was not a mere outward discipline, but the purest expression of his abandonment to the will of God, which he discerned through the will of his superiors.

The table below summarises the main stages of this brief, dense life.

Joachim Bouflet reports a case of levitation-transport : returning from Deliceto with two young workmen, Gerard stops near a chapel dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, writes a few words on a piece of paper and throws it towards the sky ; the two workmen then see him rise and fly to the place called il Francese, about five hundred metres away, where he touches the ground and calmly returns home.^[36] The two witnesses, who died around 1804, recounted what they had seen without ever varying in their account.^[37]

Bilocation, Reading of Hearts and Prophecy

Few modern saints have been credited with such a profusion of mystical gifts. The Catholic Encyclopedia lists them : Gerard was favoured "with an infused science of the highest order, ecstasies, the gift of prophecy, discernment of spirits and penetration of hearts, bilocation, and what seemed an unlimited power over nature, sickness and demons."^[38] Several testimonies, gathered during the canonization process, report that he was seen and heard in two places at once.^[39][40] To those who came to him, he read the state of their soul and recalled forgotten sins, bringing sinners back to confession.

Power over Nature and Sickness

Redemptorist tradition preserves a wealth of prodigies attributed to Gerard : he is said to have restored life to a child fallen from a cliff, blessed a store of wheat that lasted until the following harvest, multiplied bread for the poor, and walked upon the waves of a stormy sea to guide a boat of fishermen in distress.^[41][42] Beyond the marvellous, these accounts speak a spiritual truth : the transparency of a soul so united to God that creation itself seemed to obey him. When he accompanied the Fathers on missions, or was sent on business, "he converted more souls than many missionaries."^[43]

The Pirofalo Handkerchief : The Origin of the Patronage of Mothers

Among all these prodigies, one has remained for ever attached to Gerard's name. While visiting the Pirofalo family, the saint dropped his handkerchief. A young girl of the household ran to return it to him ; Gerard told her to keep it — "it may be useful to you one day."^[44][45] Years later, married and about to die in childbirth, she remembered those words and had the handkerchief brought to her : the pain ceased at once and she gave birth to a healthy child.^[46] From this account was born the devotion that has made Gerard, throughout the world, the patron of pregnant women and of childbirth.

"My God, I wish to die in order to do Thy most holy will." — Saint Gerard Majella^[47]

Neria Caggiano's Accusation

The highest episode of Gerard's holiness was a trial of honour. In 1754, a young woman named Neria Caggiano, whom Gerard had helped enter a convent and who had left it after a few weeks, began, to justify her conduct, to slander the saint by accusing him of guilty dealings with a young girl.^[48][49] The accusation, carried as far as Saint Alphonsus, was of extreme gravity : it aimed at the very purity of a religious.

Heroic Silence and Deprivation of Communion

Faithful to a Redemptorist rule which required an accused religious not to justify himself, Gerard kept silent.^[50][51] He denied nothing, defended himself in nothing, called no witness. Saint Alphonsus, troubled, subjected him to a severe trial : he set him aside and deprived him of Holy Communion for several months — a heartbreaking punishment for a soul so hungry for the Eucharist. Questioned later on the reasons for his muteness, Gerard answered simply that patience before an unjust accusation seemed to him the attitude required of a disciple of Christ.^[52]

"Brother Gerard is a saint." — Saint Alphonsus Liguori, after the trial of the calumny^[53]

Confession and Rehabilitation — Patron of the Falsely Accused

The truth burst forth at last. Having fallen gravely ill, Neria Caggiano wrote to Saint Alphonsus to confess that her accusation had been nothing but a pure lie, a calumny invented out of whole cloth.^[54][55] Gerard was fully rehabilitated and restored to Communion. His silence, more eloquent than any defence, has since had him recognized as the patron of the falsely accused : he teaches that a Christian's honour rests in God's hands, not in self-justification.

The Motto on the Cell Door

Gerard's whole spirituality is condensed in the motto he had inscribed on the door of his room :^[56]

"Here is done that which God wills, as God wills, and for as long as He wills it." — Motto inscribed by Saint Gerard Majella on his cell door^[57]

This formula is no ornament : it is a programme of life. Gerard sought neither consolations nor extraordinary works, but the single conformity of his will to God's, in all things, in God's manner, for the time willed by God. He was often heard repeating that he desired to die in order to do the divine will.^[58] This abandonment joins the great tradition of abandonment to God taught by the saints and the Uniformity with the will of God which his master Saint Alphonsus had made the heart of his spiritual doctrine.

Hunger for the Eucharist and for Suffering

Two hungers dwelt in Gerard : the Eucharist and suffering. His devotion to the Blessed Sacrament was such that, according to his biographer, he was "so drawn to Our Lord in the tabernacle that he had to do violence to himself to leave it."^[59] The other side of his love was the desire to suffer with Christ : his ambition, writes the Catholic Encyclopedia, was "to be like Jesus Christ in His sufferings and humiliations."^[60] The calumny of 1754 was for him no accident, but the granting of that desire.

Gerard, Abandonment and the Divine Will

Gerard's holiness offers a luminous example of what Catholic tradition calls doing the will of God : adhering, in faith and love, to all that God permits or ordains. This heroic adherence, lived in silence and obedience, prepares from afar the still higher doctrine of life in the Divine Will which the Church would meditate later. Gerard is no theoretician : he is a witness. His motto engraved on a door is worth every treatise, because it was entirely lived, down to his deathbed. For today's reader, he remains a practical master of trustful abandonment to God.

The Last Days at Materdomini

From the summer of 1755, the tuberculosis that had long undermined him carried off his last strength. Gerard, who had received the gift of prophecy, foretold the day and hour of his death.^[61] He died in the night of 15 to 16 October 1755, at the Redemptorist house of Caposele, called Materdomini, aged only twenty-nine.^[62][63] According to a persistent tradition, a last note was said to have been found near him, echoing the motto of his whole life : "Here is done the will of God." His tomb, at Materdomini, at once became a place of pilgrimage which crowds — mothers above all — never ceased to visit.^[64]

Beatification (1893) and Canonization (1904)

The miracles that multiplied at his tomb brought about the swift opening of his cause. Leo XIII beatified him on 29 January 1893, then Pius X canonized him on 11 December 1904.^[65][66] The canonization process, notes the encyclopaedist, brought to light miracles "of the greatest variety and the greatest profusion." His liturgical feast is celebrated on 16 October, the day of his death.

Patron of Mothers and Unborn Children

No devotion has done more for Gerard's popularity than his patronage of mothers. Born of the miracle of the handkerchief, it has spread throughout the world : countless pregnant women invoke him for a happy delivery, and the shrines dedicated to him often preserve the ex-votos of favours obtained. The table below summarises the extent of his patronage and its origin.

More than two and a half centuries after the tailor of Muro, his message remains of a disarming simplicity : in a world that wants to master everything, Gerard recalls that holiness is not the accomplishment of great works, but total and joyful abandonment to the will of God.

• Saint Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787) — the founder of the Redemptorists, Gerard's master and judge, and Doctor of Uniformity with the will of God.
• Saint Paul of the Cross (1694-1775) — Gerard's contemporary, another great mystic of the Passion in 18th-century Italy.
• Saint Benedict Joseph Labre (1748-1783) — like Gerard, several times refused by cloisters before finding his own path of holiness.
• Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort (1673-1716) — missionary and spiritual master of the same Catholic revival.
• What do the saints say about abandonment to God? — the great spiritual tradition to which Gerard's motto belongs.
• Doing the will of God or living in the Divine Will? — to place Gerard's abandonment within the doctrine of the Divine Will.