16 April - Benoît-Joseph Labre, born on 26 March 1748 in Amettes (Pas-de-Calais), which belonged to the diocese of Boulogne-sur-Mer (France) and died on 16 April 1783 in Rome, was a French mendicant pilgrim who travelled the roads of Europe.
The eldest of a family of fifteen children, Benoît-Joseph Labre was the son of Jean-Baptiste Labre and Anne-Barbe Gransire, the father a farmer owning a few hectares of land and the mother running a haberdashery. He was baptized the day after his birth by his uncle and godfather, François-Joseph Labre, vicar of Ames and then parish priest of Érin. He learns to read, write and count at the school in Amette, then at the school in Nédon. The child is discreet, modest, and very early in life lived a life of deep faith. His family also destined him for the priesthood when, as the eldest of siblings, he was destined to take over his father's farm. At the age of twelve, he was welcomed by his uncle, the parish priest of Erin, where he stayed for six and a half years. His uncle "wanted to continue his education and teach him the principles of the Latin language". Benoît-Joseph then made his First Communion and received confirmation.
Around the age of sixteen, a change occurs: he abandons the study of Latin to immerse himself in the many books of piety in his uncle's library and, more particularly, the sermons of Father Le Jeune, known as the Blind Man, an Oratorian priest. He is marked by his rigorous spirituality and, taken by scruples, no longer dares to receive communion. It was at this time that he announced his intention to enter monastic life, at the age of eighteen, an age at which he was deeply affected by the death of his uncle, who had helped to care for parishioners suffering from typhus and who, having himself contracted the disease, had died of it.
After a short stay with his parents, he went to his maternal uncle, curate in Conteville-en-Ternois, to be introduced to philosophy. He then presented himself at the Chartreuse de Longuenesse, but, too young, he was not accepted. He then tried his luck at the Chartreuse de Neuville-sous-Montreuil, but was advised to learn singing and philosophy first. He returned there on October 6, 1767, and left after six weeks: the prior considered him to be in fragile health, suffering from anxiety and too inclined towards excessive austerity.
Back at his parents' home, he stayed there until 1768. He was then twenty years old. He is still refused by the Soligny trap door, because he is still too young.
On 12 August 1769, he left his father's home for good and returned, on the recommendation of the Bishop of Boulogne, to the Carthusian monastery of Neuville, but left in October. As far as the prior was concerned, he did not have a vocation to be a Carthusian. He announced this to his parents on October 20 in a letter; it is one of the two letters of Benedict that have been preserved. It testifies to his confidence: "The good Lord will assist me and lead me in the undertaking that He Himself has inspired in me". Nevertheless, he emphasizes in it: "I will always have the fear of God before my eyes and His love in my heart".
As he indicated to his parents, he took the religious habit at the Abbey of Sept-Fons on November 11, 1769 and took the name of Brother Urbain. He was once again beset by scruples, no longer dared to take communion or receive absolution for lack of contrition. The register of the novitiate indicates: "dismissed because of his spiritual punishments which gave cause to fear for his head".
Refused everywhere, Benoît-Joseph finally finds his religious vocation in a life of beggar and pilgrim, going from sanctuary to sanctuary. What he earns by begging goes most often to other poor people, earning him a reputation for holiness. Thus, he is seen singing the Litanies of the Blessed Virgin at the window of a prison at the top of his lungs and giving the prisoners the coins that had been thrown to him out of charity. According to the oral testimonies of those who have seen him during his peregrinations, he travels on foot nearly 30,000 km all over Europe, from France to Spain, from Switzerland to Italy.
Always on foot, he made a pilgrimage to Rome, where he arrived in December 1770, to Santiago de Compostela (1773), back to Rome in 1774, then to Loreto in 1777, visiting the Holy House of Loreto on numerous occasions because of his devotion to the Virgin Mary. He settled in Rome the following year. He was twenty-nine years old. He became a member of the Franciscan Third Order after having received in Assisi at the tomb of St. Francis the cord of the Third Franciscan Order (he became a cordigere) on November 20, 1770. In a spirit of mortification, he also made a vow not to wash. His lack of hygiene and his vermin became proverbial and aroused a lot of sarcasm in this period of history known as the Philosophy of the Enlightenment.
Its perpetual wandering, a kind of life admired in the Middle Ages, the golden age of great pilgrimages, was no longer admired in the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment, and astonished, even indisposed, its contemporaries, arousing the mistrust of local authorities. He met everyone in a fraternal spirit, and was sometimes mistreated or mocked by his companions and fellow travellers, by children or people he met, but, always dressed in a cloak and a felt hat, with only a breviary, a pilgrim's bumblebee and a flask on his shoulder, he preferred to smile at them rather than defend himself.
Also animated by a profound life of prayer and contemplation, he wrote the Prayer of the Three Hearts (1771). He wished "to know how to love those who have been lost and to love them in their very perdition" (1776), which added to his reputation for holiness.
Some say he lived six years in the ruins of the Colosseum. It also seems that he spent some of his nights in the evangelical hospice of Saint-Martin-aux-Monts, before dying at the age of thirty-five in the odour of holiness, on April 16, 1783, a Holy Wednesday, at the home of the butcher Zaccarelli, who had found him passed out on the steps of the church of Sainte-Marie-des-Monts.
The news of his death would have been spread in Rome by the children to the cries of "È morto il santo" ("He died the saint!"). His burial at the church of Sainte-Marie-des-Monts in the middle of Lent gave rise to such manifestations of popular faith that the Corsican guard of Pope Pius VI had to intervene.
