Saint of the Day Online - St Cajetan

Saint of the day online, Monday, August 07, 2017

Saint Name: St Cajeta
Place: Vicenza, Veneto, Republic of Venice (now Italy)
Birth: 7 August 1480
Death: 7 August 1547 (aged 66)
Feast: August 7

St Cajetan who was born on October 1, 1480, was an Italian Catholic priest and religious reformer, who helped found the Theatines.  He is recognized as a saint in the Catholic Church, and his feast day is August 7.

In 1523, the Church was in sad shape. People could not get the spiritual nourishment they needed from the large numbers of uneducated and even immoral priests who took their money but returned nothing. When good priests and lay people turned to the hierarchy for help, they found leaders at best apathetic and indifferent to their concerns.

How should a good Catholic respond to this situation? We all know how Luther and others responded -- by splitting away from the Catholic Church when their pleas went unheard.

Cajetan took a different route. Just as concerned as Luther was about what he observed in the Church, he went to Rome in 1523 -- not to talk to the pope or the hierarchy but to consult with members of a confraternity called the Oratory of the Divine Love. When he had first come to Rome many years before, he had felt called to some unknown great work there. A few years later he returned to his hometown of Vicenza -- his great work seemingly unrealized. He had however studied for the priesthood and been ordained and helped re-establish a faded confraternity whose aims were promoting God's glory and the welfare of souls.

In the years he had been gone from Rome, he had founded another Oratory in his home town and Verona where he had promoted spiritual life and care for the poor and sick not only with words but with his heroic example. He told his brothers, "In this oratory, we try to serve God by worship; in our hospital, we may say that we actually find him." But none of the horrors he saw in the hospitals of the incurables depressed him as much as the wickedness he saw everywhere he looked.

Worn out by the troubles he saw in his Church and his home, Cajetan fell ill. When doctors tried to get him to rest on a softer bed then the boards he slept on, Cajetan answered, "My savior died on a cross. Let me died on wood at least." He died on August 7, 1547.