St. Gerard Majella

Who they were

Gerard was born in Muro Lucano, in southern Italy, to a tailor who died when the boy was twelve. He was apprenticed out, worked as a servant to a bad-tempered bishop, and tried repeatedly to join religious orders that turned him down, generally on the grounds that he was too frail to be useful.

The Redemptorists eventually took him as a lay brother, reportedly with a note from the founder, Alphonsus Liguori, that he was a useless brother but that they should take him anyway. He worked as a tailor, gardener, sacristan and infirmarian, and became known across the region for an unusual reputation, much of which was recorded during his lifetime rather than after it.

The episode that matters most to his patronage is an accusation. A young woman accused him of fathering her child. The rule of his order was severe about such things, and Gerard, who had a right to defend himself, said nothing at all. He accepted the penalty and the suspicion. Months later the woman withdrew the accusation and admitted she had invented it. Gerard, asked why he had not spoken, is recorded as saying that there was a rule about not defending oneself.

He died of tuberculosis at twenty-nine. He was canonized in 1904.

Much of what is recorded about him comes from testimony gathered close to his life rather than centuries later, which is unusual for a saint of his kind and makes the record somewhat firmer than most. The accounts describe a man who was regarded as odd by many of the people around him, given to long absences in prayer and to giving away things that were not strictly his to give.

He is the patron saint on more maternity wards and Catholic hospital wings than almost anyone, particularly in the United States and Italy, and the devotion is carried almost entirely by women who have been through a frightening pregnancy and by the nurses who looked after them.

Why people turn to St. Gerard Majella

The patronage of expectant mothers has two threads. The first is that accusation: a woman's pregnancy stood at the centre of the worst thing that happened to him, and he protected her reputation at the cost of his own. The second is a story from near the end of his life, in which he is said to have left a handkerchief with a family and told a daughter she would need it one day. The account is that years later, in a dangerous labour, the handkerchief was sent for and the danger passed. That is a devotional story rather than a documented event, and it is worth saying so, but it is the reason his name is on so many maternity wards.

How to ask their intercession

Name the mother and the child. Ask him to pray for a safe delivery, and for the people caring for her. Where a pregnancy has already been lost, or where a couple has been trying for a long time, this is also his territory, and the asking does not need to be optimistic to be real.