Somascan fathers at Spearwood parish prepare to celebrate their saints feast day marking 500 years since their patron’s liberation from imprisonment.
St Jerome Emiliani (1481-1537) was no plastic saint – fallen one day and holy the next.
When Our Lady visited him in prison and freed him from captivity, his ascent to sanctity was anything but immediate, Somascan priest Fr Johnson Malayil CRS told The Record.
St Jerome’s Parish, Spearwood, will celebrate their saint’s feast day on 11 February, inviting the whole archdiocese to a 6pm celebration of his life and the Somascan’s ongoing work in his charism.
Favoured with noble birth and rising to govern a stronghold of the Venetian army, Jerome had led a Godless life up until the city’s defeat at the hands of German aggressors; drifting away from the faith of his childhood.
Bound in chains and languishing in the bowels of a dungeon, no one stepped forward to pay his ranson.
Dejected and alone, the Blessed Virgin appeared to St Jerome and loosed his chains, securing his mystical escape.
But liberation of a spiritual kind took years of stumbling prayer, Fr Johnson said, and it was some time before St Jerome knew God was calling him to care for orphaned children and the desititute.
In some ways, the task was simply visited upon him, as the city suffered famine and then plague in relatively quick succession.
Like his saintly contemporary St Ignatius of Loyola, St Jerome was a harbinger of the counter-reformation, but one that starts, Fr Johnson said, with personal reformation and conversion.
“It was a counter-Reformation from within, to that state of sanctity that was characteristic of the Church of the apostles,” Fr Johnson said.
“He realised that reformation takes place individually and that by reforming himself he took part in reforming the Church.”
More than 400 years before the Second Vatican Council, St Jerome’s life integrated two streams which have been seemingly divergent ever since – those of justice and sanctity.
It’s an integration the Somascan’s strive to maintain today in their pastoral care in the developed and developing world.
“Our aim is not just to provide young people with food and accommodation but showing them the paternity of God; the face of God the Father,” Fr Johnson said.
“In that way we help them to develop a relationship with God and reformation from within.”
“If we are just secularised and only care for human beings’ earthly life then we diminish their dignity which is open to eternal life. But if you are concerned only about their spiritual life you diminish the value of human life here,” he said.
“St Jerome Emiliani was both: caring for people’s earthly life but knowing they were meant for eternal life.”