Saint of the Day Online - St. Bernardine of Siena

Saint of the Day for Saturday, May 20th, 2017

Saint Name: St. Bernardine of Siena

Place: Aquila, Italy

Feast: 20 May

Birth: 1380

Death: 1444

About:

St Bernardino of Siena was born on 8th September 1380, was an Italian priest and Franciscan missionary. He was a systematizer of Scholastic economics. His popular preaching made him famous during his own lifetime, although it was frequently directed against sorcery, gambling, infanticide, witchcraft, sodomy (homosexuality) and usury (as commonly practiced by Jews). Bernardino was later canonized by the Catholic Church as a saint - where is also referred to as “the Apostle of Italy” for his efforts to revive the country's Catholic faith during the 15th century.

In the year 1400, a young man came to the door of the largest hospital in Siena. A plague was raging through the city so horrible that as many as twenty people died each day just in the hospital alone. And many of the people who died were those who were needed to tend the ill. It was a desperate situation -- more and more people were falling ill and fewer and fewer people were there to help them.

The twenty-year-old man who stood there had not come because he was ill but because he wanted to help. And he brought not new patients but young men like himself willing to tend the dying. For four months Bernardine and his companions worked day and night not only to comfort the patients but to organize and clean the hospital. Only at the end of the plague did Bernardine himself fall ill -- of exhaustion.

But that was Bernardine's way -- whatever he did, he put his whole self into it. Immediately after he recovered he was back caring for the sick -- but this time, he was responsible not for a whole hospital but one person -- an invalid aunt. Yet for fourteen months she got his full attention. Throughout his life, he put as much energy into caring for one person as for hundreds, as much commitment into converting one citizen as to preaching to a whole city.

 He died in 1444 when he was almost 64 years old.