Place your trust in God alone
From a letter to his brothers by Saint Jerome Emiliani (1481-1537)
Saint Jerome was born at Venice, Italy in 1481 of wealthy parents. His father died when he was a teenager and he joined the army in 1501. In 1508 he was taken prisoner by the Venetian forces and a chained in a dungeon. He prayed to the Blessed Virgin Mary and was miraculously freed. He then made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Treviso in fulfillment of a vow. He returned to Venice to supervise the education of his nephews and study theology and perform works of charity. While studying for the priesthood he was appointed Mayor of Treviso. After his ordination in 1518, he assisted the sick in hospitals and worked with the poor. When a plague broke out in 1528, he assisted the great number of orphans left in its wake and rented a house to shelter them near the church of St. Rose. He took charge of a hospital for incurables founded by St. Cajetan. He built another hospital in Verona in 1531 and erected two orphanages at Bergamo, one for boys and another for girls. He founded the first home for fallen women who wished to do penance. In 1532 Jerome founded a religious society taking residence in a secluded hamlet between Milan and Bergamo dedicated to caring for orphans, assisting the poor and the ministering to the sick.
Jerome fell a martyr to his charitable works contracting a fatal disease at Bergamo. He died at Somascha in 1537 at age 56. He was beautified by Benedict XIV in 1747, and canonized by Clement XIII in 1767. Two authors wrote separate biographies of his life. The religious order he formed eventually united with the “Theatines” and was favored by St. Charles Borromeo. The order later took the name “Congregation of Clerics Regular” called the Somascans, dedicated to the education of youth. Their work spread into Austria and Switzerland developing 119 houses in the four provinces of Rome, Lombardy, Venice and France. Below is his letter to his brothers in the order.
Place your trust in God alone
Sons of the Society of the Servants of the Poor, and dearly beloved brothers in Christ: Greetings from your poor father. I urge you to persevere in your love for Christ and your faithful observance of the law of Christ. In word and work I set an example for you when I was with you. And so the Lord is glorified in you through me.
Our goal is God, the source of all good. As we say in our prayer, we are to place our trust in God and in no one else. In his kindness, our Lord wished to strengthen your faith, for without it, as the evangelist points out, Christ could not have performed many of his miracles. He also wished to listen to your prayer, and so he ordained that you experience poverty, distress, abandonment, weariness and universal scorn. It was also his desire to deprive you of my physical presence, even though I am with you in spirit as your poor, dear, beloved father.
God alone knows the reasons for all this, yet we can recognize three causes. In the first place, our blessed Lord is telling you that he desires to include you among his beloved sons, provided that you remain steadfast in his ways, for this is the way he treats his friends and makes them holy.
The second reason is that he is asking you to grow continually in your confidence in him alone and not in others. For God, as I said before, does not work in those who refuse to place all their confidence and hope in him alone. But he does impart the fullness of his love upon those who possess a deep faith and hope; for them he does great things. So if you have been endowed with faith and hope, he will do great things for you; he will raise up the lowly. In depriving you of myself and everyone else you have loved, he will offer you an opportunity to choose one of these alternatives: either you will forsake you faith and return to the ways of the world, or you will remain steadfast in your faith and pass the test.
Now there is a third reason. God wishes to test you like gold in the furnace. The dross is consumed by the fire, but the pure gold remains and its value increases. It is in this manner that God acts with his good servant, who puts his hope in him and remains unshaken in times of distress. God raises him up and, in return for the things he has left out of love for God, he repays him a hundred-fold in this life and with eternal life hereafter.
This is the way God has dealt with all his saints. So it was with his people Israel after their period of trial in Egypt. He not only led them out of Egypt with many miracles and fed them with manna in the desert, he also gave them the promised land. If then you remain constant in faith in the face of trial, the Lord will give you peace and rest for a time in this world, and for ever in the next.
Source: The Liturgy of the Hours – Office of Readings