Who was St. Benedict Joseph Labre?
He was born in March 1748 at Amettes, a village in northern France in the diocese of Boulogne, the eldest child of Jean-Baptiste Labre and Anne-Barbe Grandsire, a middle-class family, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia. The sources disagree on the small things: the Catholic Encyclopedia gives March 26 and fifteen children, Franciscan Media March 25 and eighteen. At twelve he went to live with his uncle, the parish priest of Erin, who taught him Latin and history for six years. The Encyclopedia says he developed a growing distaste for any learning that did not lead straight to God.
At sixteen he wanted to join the Trappists at La Trappe. His parents refused. He applied later, twice, and was refused by the monks. The Carthusians at Val-Sainte-Aldegonde turned him down; at Neuville they told him he was not yet twenty and "there was no hurry," and sent him to learn plainchant and logic, and after six weeks as a postulant he left. In November 1769 he entered the Cistercian abbey of Sept-Fonts, where, the Encyclopedia says, "his health gave way, and it was decided that his vocation lay elsewhere." Dominic Monti, a Franciscan historian, is blunter: Benedict "often suffered from depression," and the monasteries rejected him "as unsuitable for community life."
So he went on the road. He came to believe, after testing the idea with confessors, that God wanted him to be a pilgrim with no home. For the next thirteen years he walked between the great shrines of Europe: Loreto, Assisi, Naples, Bari and Fabriano in Italy, Einsiedeln in Switzerland, Compostela in Spain, Paray-le-Monial in France. He lived on alms, Franciscan Media says, wore a beggar's rags, shared what food he was given with other poor people, and spent his hours before the Blessed Sacrament and in devotion to the Mother of God. His own explanation, preserved by Franciscan Media, was short: "our comfort is not in this world."
Monti says that after 1774 he mostly stayed in Rome; the Catholic Encyclopedia says he spent the last six years of his life there. Either way, he left once a year to walk to Loreto, and Monti says he slept in the ruins of the Colosseum. Romans called him "the poor man of the Forty Hours," because he was always at the churches where the Blessed Sacrament was exposed, and "the beggar of Rome." Vatican News calls him "the vagabond of God," a man who "chose the streets as his monastery." On April 16, 1783, the Catholic Encyclopedia and Franciscan Media say, after praying for two hours in a church, he collapsed on the steps of Santa Maria dei Monti and was carried to a house nearby, where he died. Monti tells it a little differently: he collapsed after Mass in Holy Week and died the next day in the house of a friendly butcher. He was thirty-five. Within three months, the Encyclopedia says, his confessor Marconi had recorded 136 cures attributed to his intercession, and the evidence helped bring about the conversion of an American, John Thayer of Boston. Pius IX declared him Venerable in 1859, and Leo XIII canonized him on December 8, 1881, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia and Franciscan Media; Monti gives 1860 for his beatification and 1883 for his canonization.
Why Catholics pray to St. Benedict Joseph Labre for mental illness and homelessness
No pope has named him patron of either. Franciscan Media lists him as patron of homeless persons; Monti says he is "venerated today as the patron of homeless people, especially those with mental health struggles." Both patronages are traditional, and both come from the bare facts of his life rather than from any decree.
The homelessness is plain. He had no address for thirteen years. He slept outdoors, begged, was dirty, and was looked at the way people on the street are looked at now. Catholics who have lost a home, or who are afraid of losing one, or whose brother or daughter has disappeared onto the street, pray to a saint who was that person.
The mental illness is less certain, and we will not pretend otherwise. The sources do not diagnose him. What they say is that he was turned away again and again, that his health broke under community life, and that, in Monti's words, he often suffered from depression. Whether a modern doctor would call it depression, or something else, we cannot know. What the Church knows is that a man whom no religious house would keep, who could not finish what he started, who lived in a way that looked to everyone like failure, is a canonized saint. That is why people with depression, and families carrying a member's illness, pray to him.
How to pray to St. Benedict Joseph Labre
His feast is April 16, the day of his death. He is not on the General Roman Calendar, so you will not hear his Mass in most parishes, but the Encyclopedia says his feast is kept on that day and Vatican News lists him among the saints of April 16. A novena can be prayed April 7 to 15. If you are in Rome, pray at Santa Maria dei Monti, the church on whose steps he fell.
Say the prayer below and then tell him, in your own words, who is on the street or who is not well. Pair it with what the Church gives: Confession, the Eucharist, and time before the Blessed Sacrament, which was where he spent his own days. Pair it also with help from people. Asking his prayers is not a reason to delay seeing a doctor, taking medication, calling a counselor or walking into a shelter. If you or someone you love is in danger tonight, call emergency services or, in the United States, 988. And when you pass someone sleeping rough, remember that he looked exactly like that.