Feast day: August 7

St. Cajetan

Priest, Founder · 1480–1547

Patron of The unemployed, job seekers

An Italian priest who founded the Theatines to reform the clergy and started charitable pawnshops to rescue the poor from ruinous moneylenders.

Cajetan, or Gaetano, was born in 1480 at Vicenza, in the Venetian territory of Italy, into a noble family, and trained as a lawyer, earning doctorates in civil and canon law before entering the service of the papal court in Rome. There, moved to give himself more fully to God, he was ordained a priest in middle age.

He lived in the troubled decades just before and during the Protestant Reformation, when the Italian Church was widely seen as worldly and lax. Cajetan's response was reform from within: with a small group of like-minded priests — including the future Pope Paul IV — he founded in 1524 the Theatines, a new community of 'clerks regular,' priests living under religious vows yet working in the world, dedicated to recovering the holiness and zeal of the early Church.

The Theatines committed themselves to a radical trust in divine providence, refusing even to beg and relying wholly on what was freely given, and to a thorough renewal of priestly life, preaching, and care of the sick. They became a model for the Catholic reform that would gather force at the Council of Trent.

Cajetan spent his later years at Naples, where he laboured against heresy and among the poor and the sick, and where he is said to have died in 1547 of grief at the strife tearing the city apart. Canonized in 1671, he is invoked — through his teaching on trust in providence — as a patron of the unemployed and of those seeking work.

He founded a 'mount of piety' — a non-profit pawnshop lending to the poor without crushing interest — and is invoked today by the unemployed and job seekers.

Image: Francesco Solimena (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/03145a.htm