Feast day: May 23

St. John Baptist de Rossi

Priest · 1698–1764

Patron of —

A Roman priest who, despite his own fragile health, gave himself to the most neglected of the city — herdsmen, prisoners, the homeless, and the dying poor.

John Baptist de Rossi was born in 1698 in a village near Genoa and went to Rome as a boy to be educated by relatives. Despite suffering from epilepsy, which he bore patiently all his life, he was ordained a priest in 1721 and devoted himself wholly to the most neglected of the city's poor.

He sought out those whom others overlooked: the herdsmen, carters, and labourers of the Roman Campagna, to whom he preached at dawn and dusk in the open spaces of the old city; the sick poor in the hospitals; and the homeless women wandering the streets at night, for whom he founded a refuge.

Above all he became renowned as a confessor. After years in which his illness had made him afraid to hear confessions, he overcame the fear and gave himself tirelessly to the confessional, sought out by penitents of every kind — so gentle and wise a guide of souls that crowds waited for him.

He held a canonry whose income he spent entirely on the poor, keeping nothing for himself, and lived in genuine poverty to the end. He died in 1764 and was canonized in 1881, honoured as a model of the parish priest and confessor wholly spent on the poor.

He turned a hostel for the homeless into a center of mercy and spent his nights in the confessional for cab drivers, laborers, and outcasts.

Image: Unknown authorUnknown author (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/08449a.htm