Feast day: July 5

St. Anthony Mary Zaccaria

Priest, Founder · 1502–1539

Patron of Physicians

A young Italian doctor who turned from medicine of the body to medicine of souls, founding the Barnabite order and reviving fervent devotion among the people of Milan.

Anthony Mary Zaccaria was born in 1502 at Cremona, in northern Italy, and first trained as a physician, taking his degree at Padua. But he found himself drawn to heal souls as well as bodies, and after a few years of practising medicine among the poor — catechizing them as he treated them — he studied for the priesthood and was ordained.

He lived at a moment when the Church in Italy was in great need of reform, its clergy and people grown lax. Zaccaria threw himself into a movement of renewal, preaching repentance, promoting frequent Communion, and reviving fervent devotion. With two companions he founded a community of priests dedicated to this work — the Clerks Regular of St. Paul, soon known as the Barnabites, after their church of St. Barnabas in Milan.

He is especially associated with spreading the public devotion of the 'Forty Hours,' the solemn exposition of and prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, and with a tender, ardent devotion to the crucified Christ and to St. Paul, whose letters he loved. He also helped found a congregation of religious women and a lay association, so that the reform might reach every state of life.

He drove himself relentlessly and died young, in 1539, at only thirty-six, worn out by his labours. Canonized in 1897, he is honoured — fittingly for the doctor who became a priest — as a patron of physicians.

He helped revive the custom of ringing church bells at three on Friday afternoon in memory of the Crucifixion, and died worn out at thirty-six.

Image: Unknown authorUnknown author (CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/01588a.htm