San Gerardo mio, prega per me

The title of this post is a mere invocation asking the intercession of Saint Gerard Maiella, though there is a song with those very words as its refrain. Processions of people in southern Italy will be singing it - some in wonderful voices, others dreadfully but with fervour - a few weeks from now. My mother (and many of her relatives and friends) had a very deep devotion to Gerardo, an 18th century saint who was from the diocese neighbouring on her own.

Gerardo is the patron of expectant mothers - which may seem an odd situation for a Redemptorist lay brother. The reason is that he was unjustly accused (by a young woman whose affair with a prominent man could not be divulged) of fathering a child. This created quite a scandal, not only, of course, for Gerardo himself, but for his community. His superior, the great moral theologian Alphonsus Liguori, was unaware of Gerardo's innocence, because Gerardo would not inform him of the injustice of the accusation. The Redemptorist rule instructed brothers not to defend themselves if they were corrected wrongly... Gerardo was a very simple man, who would not have grasped that there are times when unjust accusations need to be refuted. (He also is patron of the unjustly accused.)

What distinguishes Gerardo from most modern (as opposed to mediaeval) saints is that he was known for being a channel of miracles during his lifetime. Some verged on the bizarre - my favourite being when he accidentally dropped a key into the well, lowered a statue of the Christ Child into it, and found, when he retrieved the statue, that it was holding the key. Much as my intellectual side makes me want to scoff at such tales, I'm afraid that I see another side. Perhaps, in a time and place (this is a region not that far from where Januarius' blood liquefies) where people are open to such manifestations, they can and do occur.

Gerardo was sickly and died before the age of thirty. There are no intellectual or ministerial achievements for which he is noted. But he is valued as a powerful intercessor, which I am sure is why he is such a well-loved saint (in many lands, not only Italy.)

The communion of saints, which has powerful theological aspects which I am not going to treat today, also reminds us that we, the Church, are 'all in this together.' The days when saints were widely invoked (and anchoresses pestered and remembered in wills) were those when people did not want to be alone with their fears, guilt, worries about family, concerns about their eternal happiness.

I wish I had my mother's simplicity in prayer. She would turn to Gerardo (her paisan, after all - those from the same region are especially likely to be invoked) as one would to a good friend, confiding worries and having them lessen by the mere fact of being shared.

Elizabeth Gerarda asks now: San Gerardo mio, prega per me.