16th August ~ St Rock

He not only devoted himself to care of the sick but cured large numbers simply by making the sign of the cross on them.

ST ROCK (c. A.D. 1378)

We find this servant of God venerated in France and Italy during the early fifteenth century, not very long after his death, but we have no authentic history of his life. No doubt he was born at Montpellier and nursed the sick during a plague in Italy, but that is almost all that can be affirmed about him. His “lives” are chiefly made up of popular legends, which may have a basis in fact but cannot now be checked. According to the one written by a Venetian, Francis Diedo, in 1478, Rock was son of the governor of Montpellier, and upon being left an orphan at the age of twenty he went on a pilgrimage to Rome. Finding Italy plague-stricken he visited numerous centres of population, Acquapendente, Cesena, Rome, Rimini, Novara, where he not only devoted himself to care of the sick but cured large numbers simply by making the sign of the cross on them. At Piacenza he was infected himself, and not wishing to be a burden on any hospital he dragged himself out into the woods to die. Here he was miraculously fed by a dog, whose master soon found Rock and looked after him; when he was convalescent he returned to Piacenza and miraculously cured many more folk, as well as their sick cattle. At length he got back to Montpellier, where his surviving uncle failed to recognize him; he was there imprisoned, and so he remained five years, till he died. When they came to examine his body it was recognized who he really was, the son of their former governor, by a cross-shaped birth-mark on his breast. He was therefore given a public funeral, and he performed as many miracles when dead as he had done when alive. Another biography, shorter, simpler and perhaps older, says that St Rock was arrested as a spy and died in captivity at Angera in Lombardy.

The popularity and rapid extension of the cultus of St Rock, a veneration by no means extinct today, was remarkable, and he soon became the saint par excellence to be invoked against pestilence. St Rock is named in the Roman Martyrology, and his feast is kept in many places; there is no evidence that he was a Franciscan tertiary, but the Franciscans venerate him as such.

See the Acta Sanctorum, August, vol. iii, and “Le problème de S. Roch”, by A. Filche, in Analecta Bollandiana, vol. lxviii (1950), pp. 343–361. The saint is very popular, as anyone may learn who consults the long list of books and articles noted in the Bio-bibliographie de Chevalier. A good modern work of general interest is that of G. Ceroni, San Rocco nella vita… (1927); see also M. Bessodes, San Rocco, storia e leggende (1931); and A. Maiurino, San Rocco, confronti storici (1936) (cf. Analecta Bollandiana, vol. lv (1937), p. 193). It is curious that St Rock seems even to have left traces of cultus in England. The present St Roche’s Hill in Sussex was St Rokeshiill in 1579; and it is said that the Glasgow parliamentary division of Saint Rollox had its name from him. A short popular account of the saint may be found in Léon, Aurélio Séraphique (Eng. trans.), vol. iii, pp. 11–21.

From Butler’s Lives of the Saints