ST BENEDICT JOSEPH LABRE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXI, Issue 24, 13 October 1893, Page 11

ST BENEDICT JOSEPH LAB RE.

(From the Aye Maria.)

Bosn in 1748, in the village of Amettea in France, Benedict Joseph Libre came of parents who were in respectable though moderate circumstances. Up to his sixteenth year he follower! the studies usual to his age, and then he conceived the idea of abandoning everything for God. He took the ways generally adopted by bouls of Bimilar temperament, but, owing to apparently fortuitous eireo instances, he found those ordinary paths to perfection closed to him ; thus, twice he vainly sought admission among the Trappists ; and when at length he had been received by the Cistercians, he was toon obliged to leave them. Then he forsook bis native land, and begged bis way to Rome,

When in the Eternal City, bis voluntary destitution was well" nigh incredible. His days were spent in prayer in tbe least frequented churches, and the little sleep he allowed himself was usually taken under a bench in a cburch-p rcb. He was always bareheaded and barefooted, and seemed to know nothing about the little attentions to persooal neatness often visible even in extreme poverty ; hit rags were unworthy even of that nam", and they were infested with vermin. His food was that rejected by every other mendicant, and was usually procured in the places devoted to the dumping of gar* bage. He continued this manner of life during fifteen years, interrupting it only each Lent by a pilgrimage to Loretto. Finally, on the Wednesday of Holy Week, 1883, be was found dying on the steps of the Church of 8. Maria del Monti, and was taken into the house of a poor acquaintance, where he yielded his soul to God. And tbia miserable beggar, because of his heroic saucity — well proved in hii " process," — the Catholic Church has raised to her altars, asking for him the veneration of all her children, from his brother-beggar to tbe crowned king.

After fifty years of rxamination and discussioD, tbe Catholic Church has beatified one whom modern philanthropists and the average police justice would have sent, to gaol or the mad-bo'ise. Whut an example to set the world I What would become of civil sation if imitation of Labre were undertaken by even a small minority of those who are now asked to venerate him ? Well. St Benedict L^bre remains alone in his peculiar sphere of sanctity, ana it is very probable that he will so remain for a long time. Far from the mind of the Church is the idea that tbis saint should be indiscriminately imitated. He deemed himself called to that special way of life, and his confessors agreed with him ; he carried out the will of God — his sanctification.

But it seems to have been the desigu of Providence, in the canonisation of Benedict Labre, to furnish the world with a bWnding rebuke of th it spirit of Utilitarianism so rampant in our day, and with which so many even among Catholics are more or le » irfected. Our age tends to ha development of a civil Christianity, by tbe ehmina'.ion nf every element of the pupernaturnl. Uuable to deprive the Church of the credit of hiving founded modern civilisation, and only too willing to et joy the benefits of that culture, it so dwells upon and magnifies the civil €ff cts of the Gospel, that it presents the Christian Dispensation as principally, if not solely, an instrument of eirthly progresF. It is to counteract this tendency that God manifests as meritorious of eternal glory a kind of bolines* which, far from bsing productive of aoy merely civil benefit, would threaten, if universally imitated, even the very existenca of civilisation.

The canonisation of Benedict Labre is a les9on for the rich and a comfort for the poor, at a time when, on one side, a raging fever for wealth and power, and on tbe other, an ebullition of pocialia'io senti« ment, tend to a development oE furious anarchy in society.