A Life, for his feast on the tenth day of September — III classis
Beatus servus, quem, cum venerit dominus, invenerit vigilantem: amen dico vobis, super omnia bona sua constituet eum. “Blessed is that servant whom, when his lord shall come, he shall find watching: amen I say to you, he shall place him over all his goods.” — Communion antiphon of the Mass Iustus ut palma, from Matthew 24:46-47
I. A child asked for at Bari
He was born about the year 1245 at Sant’Angelo in Pontano, a hill town of the March of Ancona in the Papal States, to Compagnone de’ Guarutti and Amata de’ Guidiani — people of modest standing, devout, and, when the story opens, childless and no longer young. The tradition of the town, received into the canonization process and never seriously disputed, is that the couple made the pilgrimage to Bari to the tomb of St. Nicholas of Myra to ask for a son, and that a son was promised them who should belong to God. He was born, and named for the saint who had obtained him.
The hagiographers, as is their custom, record a precocious piety: that the boy fasted on the vigils appointed for grown men, that he was found praying in a cave near the town, that he fed the poor from his own plate. Historians discount such things by reflex. But the canonization process, taken in 1325 when men were still living who had known him old, is unusually well furnished with sober witnesses, and the picture they give of the man is continuous with the picture the town gives of the child: a nature quiet, grave, and turned early toward God, without any of the violence of a late conversion.
II. Nolite diligere mundum
He was given a good schooling, and while still a youth was made a canon of the collegiate church of San Salvatore at Sant’Angelo — a small benefice, but a beginning, and the kind of beginning from which a clerical career is built. He was, that is to say, already placed in the world, and comfortably.
Then he heard a sermon. An Augustinian friar named Reginald preached in the town on the text of St. John, Nolite diligere mundum, neque ea quae in mundo sunt — “Love not the world, nor the things which are in the world… And the world passeth away, and the concupiscence thereof: but he that doth the will of God abideth for ever” (1 John 2:15, 17). The young canon rose from that sermon, went to the friar, and asked to be admitted to his Order. He was about sixteen; some accounts say eighteen. He gave up the canonry, which is to say he gave up the only future he had, and was clothed in the black habit of the Hermits of St. Augustine at their house in Sant’Angelo, and professed about 1261.
Two things about the moment deserve notice. The first is the Gospel of his Mass, which the Church did not choose at random: Vendite quae possidetis, et date eleemosynam — “Sell what you possess and give alms… For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Luke 12:33-34). Nicholas heard the sentence at sixteen and did it, and the rest of his life is the heart following the treasure.
The second is the date. The Hermits of St. Augustine had been drawn together out of scattered congregations of hermits by Alexander IV in the Grand Union of 1256, only five years before. Nicholas was therefore a friar of the first generation of the united Order — one of the men who, without knowing it, would show the Order what it was for. The Augustinians had begun as hermits and were being made into mendicants; that is, men of the cell were being sent into the cities. Nicholas of Tolentino was to be the proof that the two could be one man.
III. Priest of the March
He studied, was ordained about 1270 at Cingoli, and for some years was moved from house to house through the little cities of the Marches — Recanati, Macerata, Fermo, San Ginesio, Cingoli — as obedience assigned him: a preacher, a confessor, a novice-master, and in every place remembered afterwards for the same things: that he ate almost nothing, that he prayed most of the night, that the poor knew where to find him, and that the sick were sometimes healed when he blessed them. At Cingoli he restored sight to a blind child, and the town kept his memory.
At San Ginesio, the story is told that, weakened by fasting, he was ordered by his superiors to eat meat and was brought a roasted partridge. He made the sign of the cross over the dish and the bird rose and flew from the window. The tale has the shape of a legend, and it is not necessary to salvation to believe it; but it is worth noting what it says about him, which is that his abstinence was not a private severity but something the whole Order had noticed and was trying, without success, to moderate.
It was in these years too that he received the sign that would fix his iconography for six centuries. A star was seen to rise over Sant’Angelo and travel toward Tolentino, and he understood — the accounts are unanimous — that he was being shown where he would live and die. In 1275 he was sent to the Augustinian house at Tolentino. He remained there thirty years, and is painted to this day with a star upon his breast.
IV. Tolentino
Tolentino in the last quarter of the thirteenth century was a small city of the Marches with a large share of its age’s disease: the war of Guelph and Ghibelline had come down from the great cities into the little ones and set family against family, street against street. Into this Nicholas came as a preacher and confessor, and his method was not to take a side.
He preached nearly every day, in the church and in the piazza, plainly, without ornament, on the four last things and the love of God. He heard confessions for hours and was remembered as both gentle and exact. He went through the poorest quarters of the town with bread, and into the houses of the sick and the dying, and into the prisons; he made himself the advocate of the accused and the reconciler of the feuding, and it was said that no one who had spoken with him went home angry. He was, in the fullest sense that the word can bear, the parish priest of a city that was not his parish.
The Epistle of his Mass is St. Paul’s picture of the Apostles: spectaculum facti sumus mundo — “we are made a spectacle to the world, and to angels, and to men… we are fools for Christ’s sake… we are reviled, and we bless; we are persecuted, and we suffer it; we are blasphemed, and we entreat” (1 Cor. 4:9-13). This is the mendicant vocation set down two centuries before there were mendicants, and it was the daily texture of his life at Tolentino: a man in a patched habit, ridiculed by the worldly, sought out by the wretched, blessing where he was cursed.
V. The bread of St. Nicholas
His austerities in these years were of the kind that the Church has since learned to regard with more caution than the thirteenth century did: a perpetual fast, a discipline used to blood, sleep taken on the ground. About the year 1300 they broke his health, and he lay ill. The tradition of the Order — again received into the process — is that Our Lady appeared to him in company with St. Augustine and told him to ask for a small loaf, to dip it in water, and to eat it, and that he would be restored. He did so and was healed. Thereafter he blessed small loaves and gave them to the sick, and the sick recovered.
From this come the Panini di San Nicola, the little breads blessed on his feast and distributed at his shrine and wherever the Augustinians are, still, seven hundred years later. It is a homely sacramental and a good example of the Church’s realism: she does not pretend that the body is unimportant, and she has never been embarrassed to let bread, water, and a saint’s blessing carry the mercy of God to a sickbed.
VI. Patronus animarum in Purgatorio
The devotion for which he is chiefly invoked has a precise origin.
He was at prayer one night at Tolentino when he heard himself addressed by a voice he knew: that of a friar named Pellegrino of Osimo, lately dead, who told him that he was in Purgatory and asked him to say Mass for his soul and for a multitude with him. He obtained leave to say the Mass of the dead for seven days, and at the end of them was shown, in vision, a great number of souls delivered. From that time he offered the Holy Sacrifice for the dead with a special intention and taught the faithful to do the same, and when he was canonized the Church confirmed the instinct of the people and named him patron of the souls in Purgatory.
The doctrine beneath the devotion is not sentimental. The Church teaches, as the Council of Florence and the Council of Trent would define, that there is a Purgatory and that the souls detained there are helped by the suffrages of the faithful, and chiefly by the Sacrifice of the Altar. Nicholas did nothing but believe this with his whole heart and act on it with his whole priesthood. Every Requiem said with a particular soul in mind, every “Eternal rest” murmured at a graveside, is in his line.
VII. Music in the night
In the last six months of his life the friars of Tolentino reported — and swore to it afterwards — that he heard each night, toward morning, the singing of angels, and that it consoled him beyond anything else. He said little of it except that it made him long to die. He was by then a very old man in the reckoning of his time, about sixty, worn through by thirty years of labour and forty of penance, and he knew that he was going.
He died at Tolentino on the tenth of September, 1305, having received the last sacraments in the presence of his brethren. His last recorded words were of thanks: that God had given him such a death and such a company.
His body rests at Tolentino, in the basilica that bears his name, beneath the great chapel — the Cappellone — whose walls were painted within a generation of his death with scenes of his life by masters of the Giottesque school of Rimini. The body itself was hidden during the troubles of the fourteenth century and its precise resting-place lost; it was rediscovered in 1926 and is now venerated in the crypt.
VIII. The arms that bled
A strange thing must be recorded because the Church has recorded it.
About the year 1345 a German friar — the accounts call him Teodoro — resolved to carry a relic of the saint to his own country, and, being given access to the body, cut off both arms. Blood flowed from the wounds as from a living man. He was discovered and stopped, and the arms were kept at Tolentino in a reliquary apart from the body. And for some three centuries afterwards, on some twenty occasions attested in the records of the sanctuary, the arms bled again — most often, it was observed, before some calamity of the Church or of the city. The last such occurrence is recorded in 1699.
The Church does not require belief in this. But she examined it, more than once, and did not condemn it; and it is the reason he is invoked against plague, and the reason Tolentino has kept him as its protector through every siege and pestilence since.
IX. The canonization
The inquiry into his life and miracles was opened by John XXII in 1325, twenty years after his death, and heard three hundred and sixty-five witnesses — an extraordinary number for the period — who deposed to three hundred and one miracles. The dossier was complete by 1326. And then nothing happened for a hundred and twenty years, because the Papacy was at Avignon and then divided by the Great Schism, and the canonization of a friar from the Marches was not among the things the Curia had leisure for.
He was canonized at last by Eugene IV on the fifth of June, 1446 — the first saint of the Order of Hermits of St. Augustine to be raised to the altars. His feast is kept in the traditional Roman calendar on the tenth of September, the day of his death, with the Mass Iustus ut palma.
He is patron of Tolentino; of the souls in Purgatory; of mariners in peril, of the sick, and of those in danger from fire and plague; and, by the missionaries of his Order, of many cities of the New World and of the Philippines that were founded under his name.
X. What the life teaches
Three things, chiefly.
That the world does pass away. Nicholas built his whole life on one sentence of St. John heard at sixteen, and he was right. The canonry he gave up is not remembered by anyone; the town he served is remembered because he served it. The Gospel of his Mass tells the little flock not to fear, and to sell and give, because where the treasure is, the heart will follow. Most of us hear that and postpone it. He heard it and moved.
That the hermit and the apostle are one man. He fasted like a Desert Father and preached like a Dominican; he spent the night in prayer and the day in the streets; and there is no evidence that he ever felt the two to be in tension. The Church, in setting the Epistle of the Apostles’ hard life beside the Gospel of interior detachment, is saying that they are not two vocations but two faces of one. The man who is not detached cannot be poured out; the man who is not poured out has detached himself to no purpose.
That the dead are not beyond our reach. A whole theology of the Communion of Saints is contained in a priest saying Mass seven mornings running for a friend who asked him to. The living and the dead are one Body, and the Sacrifice offered in Tolentino in 1300 reached souls the friars could not see. It still does. There is no more concrete work of charity available to an ordinary Catholic than to pray for the dead, and none more neglected.
Practice
Examine. What is the sentence of Scripture that you have heard, understood, and deferred? Nicholas’s example is not the extraordinary penance, which few are called to, but the ordinary obedience: he heard the word and did the thing.
Do. Have a Mass said this month for a soul in Purgatory — a parent, a friend, or one with no one left to remember them. Add the De profundis to your night prayers for a week. If your parish keeps the custom, seek out the blessed bread of St. Nicholas and give it to someone who is ill.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Adesto, Domine, supplicationibus nostris, quas in beati Nicolai Confessoris tui solemnitate deferimus: ut, qui nostrae iustitiae fiduciam non habemus, eius, qui tibi placuit, precibus adiuvemur.
“Attend, O Lord, to our supplications, which we offer on the solemnity of blessed Nicholas Thy Confessor: that we who have no trust in our own righteousness may be helped by the prayers of him who was pleasing to Thee.”
Devote. The Sorrowful Mysteries, offered for the souls in Purgatory; or the De profundis (Psalm 129), said slowly, with the versicle Requiem aeternam.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path continues with the mendicant saints of the thirteenth century — Francis, Dominic, Anthony of Padua — and with the mystics of the Augustinian Order who came after him, Rita of Cascia and Clare of Montefalco. The Theology and Doctrine path treats the doctrine of Purgatory and the suffrages of the faithful as defined at Florence and Trent, and the Spiritual Practices and Devotions path takes up the November devotions for the Holy Souls.
Sancte Nicolae de Tolentino, patrone animarum in Purgatorio, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Catholic Encyclopedia (1911), s.v. “St. Nicholas of Tolentino” and “Hermits of St. Augustine”; Butler’s Lives of the Saints, 10 September; the Roman Breviary, lessons of the second nocturn for the feast; and the historical materials of the Basilica of San Nicola, Tolentino, and of the Order of St. Augustine, including the summaries of the canonization process of 1325-1326 in modern Augustinian scholarship. The date of birth (c. 1245) and of profession (c. 1261) are approximate; the date of death (10 September 1305) and of canonization (5 June 1446) are secure.