Roch

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Saint Roch
Saint Roch
Pilgram
Born c. 1295 est., Montpellier, France
Died 1327
Feast August 16
Attributes Wound of thigh, dog offering bread
Patronage Invoked against cholera, epidemics, knee problems, plague, skin diseases; patron saint of bachelors, diseased cattle, dogs, falsely accused people, invalids, surgeons, tile-makers[1]; gravediggers, second-hand dealers, pilgrims
Saints Portal

Saint Roch (Latin: Rochus; Catalan: Roc; Italian: Rocco; French: Roch; Spanish and Portuguese: Roque; German: Rochus; c. 1295 – traditionally 16 August 1327[2]) was a Christian saint, a confessor whose death is commemorated on 16 August; he is specially invoked against the plague.

Contents

[edit] The historical truth about Saint Roch

According to the searches of the Belgian historian Pierre Bolle[3] (2001), that represent today the most exhaustive work on ancient lives of the saint, Saint Roch is not properly a historical saint. The work of Bolle by using a rigorous historical methodology, has cleared which of the hagiographies were the most ancient, and which were instead simple reworks and additions. According to Pierre Bolle, Saint Roch is a hagiographical doublet of a more ancient saint, Saint Racho of Autun (died ca. 660). Invoked against the storms, the figure of Raco would be to the base of the name of our saint (Raco/Roch), and of the patronage of the saint who recovers from the plague, patronage that would have been generated for aphaeresis, i.e. the fall of the first syllable of one the word, from the French name “tempeste” (storm). From “Racho” invoked to protect from “tem-peste”, to “Roch” protecting from “-peste” (plague) the step was short, and supported by the theories of medieval medicine, that attributed the causes of illness to the corruption of air and to the consequent breaking of the equilibrium inside the human body. The thesis of Bolle has completely revolutionized the studies on the saint, even if in hagiographic field the existence of doublets and homonyms to the base of the creation of new saints is a well known procedure, like in the cases of the saints Vincent of Agen and Alban of Namur.

[edit] Biography

Saint Roch, Scilla, Italy.
Saint Roch, Scilla, Italy.

According to his Acta and his vita in Legenda Aurea, he was born at Montpellier, at that time "upon the border of France" as Legenda Aurea has it,[4], the son of the noble governor of that city. Even his birth was accounted a miracle, for his noble mother had been barren until she prayed to the Virgin Mary. Miraculously marked from birth with a red cross on his breast that grew as he did, he early began to manifest strict asceticism and great devoutness; on days when his "devout mother fasted twice in the week, and the blessed child Rocke abstained him twice also, when his mother fasted in the week, and would suck his mother but once that day".[5]

On the death of his parents in his twentieth year he distributed all his worldly goods among the poor like Francis of Assisi— though his father on his deathbed had ordained him governor of Montpellier— and set out as a mendicant pilgrim for Rome[6]. Coming into Italy during an epidemic of plague, he was very diligent in tending the sick in the public hospitals at Acquapendente, Cesena Rimini, Novara[7] and Rome, and is said to have effected many miraculous cures by prayer and the sign of the cross and the touch of his hand. At Rome he preserved the "cardinal of Angleria in Lombardy"[8] by making the mark of the cross on his forehead, which miraculously remained (Legenda Aurea). Ministering at Piacenza he himself finally fell ill. He was expelled from the town; and withdrew into the forest, where he made himself a hut of boughs and leaves, which was miraculously supplied with water by a spring that arose in the place; he would have perished had not a dog belonging to a nobleman named Gothard supplied him with bread. The lord Gothard, following his hunting dog that carried the bread, discovered Saint Roch and became his acolyte.

On his return incognito to Montpellier he was arrested as a spy (by orders of his own uncle) and thrown into prison, where he languished five years and died on 16 August 1327, without revealing his name, to avoid worldly glory. After his death, according to Legenda Aurea,

"anon an angel brought from heaven a table divinely written with letters of gold into the prison, which he laid under the head of S. Rocke. And in that table was written that God had granted to him his prayer, that is to wit, that who that calleth meekly to S. Rocke he shall not be hurt with any hurt of pestilence."

The townspeople recognized him as well by his birthmark;[9] he was soon canonized in the popular mind,[10] and a great church erected in veneration.

The date (1327) asserted by Francesco Diedo for Saint Roch's death would precede the traumatic advent of the Black Death in Europe (1347-49) after long centuries of absence, for which a rich iconography of the plague, its victims and its protective saints was soon developed, in which the iconography of Roche finds its historical place: previously the topos did not exist.[11]

The first literary account is an undated Acta that is labeled, by comparison with the longer, elaborated accounts that were to follow, Acta Breviora, which relies almost entirely on standardized hagiographic topoi to celebrate and promote the cult of Roch[12]

The story that when the Council of Constance was threatened with plague in 1416, public processions and prayers for the intercession of Roch were ordered, and the outbreak ceased, is provided by Francesco Diedo, the Venetian governor of Brescia, in his Vita Sancti Rochi, 1478; the first documented cult of Roch dates to the 1460s and gained momentum during the bubonic plague that passed through northern Italy in 1477-79.[13]

Statue of St Roch in Bílá Hora, Prague (1751)
Statue of St Roch in Bílá Hora, Prague (1751)

His popular cult, originally in central and northern Italy and at Montpellier, spread through Spain, France, the Low Countries, and Germany, where he was often interpolated into the roster of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, whose veneration spread in the wake of the Black Death. The magnificent 16th-century Scuola Grande di San Rocco and the adjacent church were dedicated to him by a confraternity at Venice, where his body was said to have been surreptitiously translated and was triumphantly inaugurated in 1485[14]; the Scuola Grande is famous for its sequence of paintings by Tintoretto, who painted St Roch in glory in a ceiling canvas (1564).

Saint Roch had not been officially recognized as yet, however. In 1590 the Venetian ambassador at Rome reported back to the Serenissima that he had been repeatedly urged to present the witnesses and documentation of the life and miracles of San Rocco, already deeply entrenched in Venetian life, because Pope Sixtus V "is strong in his opinion either to canonize him or else to remove him from the ranks of the saints"; the ambassador had warned a cardinal of the general scandal that would result if the widely-venerated San Rocco were impugned as an imposter. Sixtus did not pursue the matter but left it to later popes to proceed with the canonization process.[15] In fact no pope ever acted on this.

Numerous brotherhoods have been instituted in his honour. He is usually represented in the garb of a pilgrim, often lifting his tunic to demonstrate the plague sore in his thigh, and accompanied by a dog carrying a loaf in its mouth.

San Rocco joined San Gerardo as a patron saint of the city of Potenza, Italy.

[edit] Saint Roch churches

[edit] Europe

Chiesa di San Rocco in Cles, Italy
Chiesa di San Rocco in Cles, Italy
Saint-Roch, Paris, designed by Lemercier, begun 1653: pen-and-ink drawing by Charles Norry, 1787
Saint-Roch, Paris, designed by Lemercier, begun 1653: pen-and-ink drawing by Charles Norry, 1787

[edit] North America

[edit] South America

[edit] Asia and Australasia

  • Saint Roch Catholic Church in Kahuku Hawaii
  • St. Roch's Church in Glen Iris, Melbourne, Australia
  • San Roque Church in JP Rizal St., San Roque, Marikina City, Philippines.
  • San Roque Parish Church of Navotas (Metro Manila, Philippines)
  • San Roque Cathedral, Diocese of Caloocan (Metro Manila, Philippines)
  • San Roque Church of Mandaluyong City (Metro Manila, Philippines)
  • San Roque de Manila Parish in Rizal Avenue, Sta.Cruz , Manila (Philippines)

[edit] Middle East

[edit] Other things named after St Roch

[edit] Trivia

  • A popular Spanish tongue twister is El perro de san Roque no tiene rabo porque Ramón Ramírez se lo ha robado ("Saint Roch's dog has no tail because Ramón Ramírez stole it").
  • In Bolivia, Saint Roch's day, though not as celebrated as it once was, is considered the "birthday of all dogs", in which the dogs around town can be seen with colorful ribbons tied to them.
  • The main train station of Montpellier, France is named after St. Roch, as well as a church and many squares and streets.
  • In Bingen, Germany there is a St. Rochus pilgrimage church on top of a hill. Every year in August a one week pilgrimage -the "St. Rochusfest"- is held in memory of a 17th century vow of the city council.
  • Some churches that are named after the saint distribute, as a pietistic practice, the "bread of Saint Rocco" to parishioners on August 16th, his feast day.
  • The Society of San Rocco Di Simbario (Italy) was officially founded in April of the year 1920 in Chicago by Bruno Bertucci. He owned and operated a small grocery store at the corner of 24th Street and Princeton Avenue, near Chinatown, at the St. Therese Chinese Church, formerly known as Santa Maria Incoronato.[16]
  • According to Montague Summers' The Vampire in Europe, St. Roch was prayed to in Poland to ward off vampire attacks.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ http://saints.sqpn.com/saintr06.htm
  2. ^ The date was offered by Francesco Diedo, Vita Sancti Rochi 1478.
  3. ^ Bolle, Saint Roch. Genèse et première expansion d’une culte au XVeme siècle 2001.
  4. ^ An estimated date, about 1295, has been interpolated.
  5. ^ Legenda Aurea, William Caxton' s translation, 1483.
  6. ^ He is conventionally portrayed with pilgrim's wide-brimmed hat, staff and purse.
  7. ^ "There is little concern for mapping a logical itinerary" remarks Louise Marshall, "Manipulating the Sacred: Image and Plague in Renaissance Italy" Renaissance Quarterly 47.3 (Autumn, 1994:485-532) p. 502 note 39.
  8. ^ Perhaps Angera was intended.
  9. ^ Recognition by a birthmark— "the fairy sign-manual" as Nathaniel Hawthorne called it in "The Birthmark"— is a literary trope drawn from universal, sub-literary folktale morphology, given the designation H51.1 in Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (Indiana University Press) 1955-58; the birthmark recognition has figured in Romance and marvel literature since Odysseus was recognized by his scar, long before the Hellenistic period; the birthmark-recognition motif can equally be found in Chinese and Mongolian narratives.
  10. ^ The Roman Church did not officially canonize Roch until the seventeenth century. Marie Schmitz-Eichhoff, "St. Rochus: ikonographische und medizinisch-historische Studien", Kölner medizin-historische Beiträge 3 (1977), noted in Christine M. Boeckl, "Giorgio Vasari's 'San Rocco Altarpiece': Tradition and Innovation in Plague Iconography" Artibus et Historiae 22 No. 43 (2001:29-40) p 39 note 13.
  11. ^ Boeckl 2001:35.
  12. ^ Very fully demonstrated by Irene Vaslef, in a dissertation noted by Marshall 1994:502 and note, 503.
  13. ^ The earliest testimony is Roch's appearance in two altarpieces from the Vivarini Venetian workshops in 1464 and 1465. (Marshall 1994:503 note 41, 504 and note 45).
  14. ^ Marshall 1994:505.
  15. ^ Marshall 1994:503 note 43. Also Peter Burke, “How To Be a Counter-Reformation Saint,” in Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800, ed. Kaspar von Greyerz (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984), p. 47.
  16. ^ History of Saint Rocco Devotion

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roch"
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