Most of us think of a hermit as a man who leaves the world. He finds a cave, and the noise fades. Benedict Joseph Labre did the opposite.
He was born in 1748 in Amettes, the eldest of fifteen children of a shopkeeper. He asked the Carthusians and the Trappists for a habit. The doors closed. So he took the one desert that was left — the roads of Catholic Europe, then the streets of Rome — and lived there as if the stones were a cell. He slept in a hole in the Colosseum. By day he went from church to church, following the Forty Hours, until Romans who did not know his name called him the saint of the Quarant’Ore.
He was not born poor. He chose a poverty the cloister would not give him. On Wednesday of Holy Week, 1783, he sank onto the steps of Santa Maria ai Monti. A butcher carried him to a bed. Children ran through the lanes crying that the saint was dead. The Church agreed, years later. She did not canonise the looking away.
This little book is for anyone who has been refused a door, and for anyone who still walks past a person on a step. Read it in one sitting if you can. Then go out. The pages are only a path back to the street.
A Silent Homilies booklet. Written to be read in one or two sittings.