Somascan Movement: you don’t embrace a ‘cause’, you embrace a person in need – whether poor, sick or abandoned – and at the same time, you embrace Christ!

Jerome: A man of Modern Devotion

During a time in the Catholic Church’s history when strict paths of sanctity separated the clergy/consecrated religious from the layperson, St Jerome Emiliani’s modern devotion practices made him a ‘lay prophet’ responding to the universal call to holiness for every baptised person, a call subsequently proclaimed during the Second Vatican Council nearly 450 years later. St Jerome Emiliani lived his ‘modern devotion’ by:

realising the imitation of Jesus Christ in every part of his life;
exercising self-discipline as an effort to correct his faults, sustained by God’s grace;
completely loving Christ’s Church, without excessive practices;
converting any tense environment into a climate of intense religious fervour.

Jerome: A man of the Catholic Reformation

Responding to the urgency of the times with the Protestant Reformation occurring in nearby Germany, St Jerome Emiliani simultaneously actively worked towards a Catholic Reformation of the Church achieved fundamentally through:

starting with ‘oneself’ with personal conversion;
serving the poor, sick, abandoned and converted by works of charity;
fidelity to Christian values that accepts and defends the authority of the Catholic Church, the sanctity of the sacraments, and the necessity of good works awakened by faith;
the catechesis of fellow laypersons as to the values of the Gospel whether in the hospitals, orphanages, schools or refuge homes he established or whilst working alongside the faithful in the agricultural fields.

Jerome: A man of the Renaissance

Living in 16th Century Venice, where the Renaissance was very much alive, St Jerome Emiliani’s personality was formed in this culturally rich context. He was able reread and revise the cultural sensitivity of the Renaissance and drawing the focus on Christ through:

a Christian ‘re-birth’ that returned to the faith’s origins, namely the life of sanctity that was the Church’s characteristic of the first centuries during the time of the apostles;
a sense of the dignity of every human person regardless whether they are poor, orphaned, dying, or in a situation of moral difficulty and the importance of their cultural formation;
a predisposition to nurture the qualities and talents of each child who lived and was educated in his orphanages and schools;
a quest for glory, not self-glory, but that of Christ.

St Jerome Emiliani: Founder of Catholic Professional Formation

St Jerome Emiliani is recognised as the revolutionary founder of Catholic professional education when on 6 February 1531 he conceived and established the first “school-workshop” alongside the Church of Saint Rocco, Venice.

This Saint’s response to the social and moral needs during a period of death and delinquency, due to widespread plague and famine, was to gather all the orphaned children and realise his intention of reforming the Catholic Church, commencing with these ‘little ones’ in need.

Here arose the appearance of the first apprenticeship contract, not addressed to the children of elite guild members, but to the abandoned and needy-orphaned children who were consequently elevated into a dignified standard of living – one of work, devotion and charity.

With the model of apprenticeship training, the school-workshop manifested the start of a new learning experience, one of filial love, solid Catholic teaching and ‘on-the- job’ professional skills transfer. St Jerome Emiliani provided orphans with a family environment to address their grave poverty of love, instilling that everyone became the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, the child and heir of God through faith in Christ, and the imitation of His holy life.

St Jerome Emiliani modelled his subsequent orphanages, refuge homes and schools established across Northern Italy on the Saint Rocco School-Workshop. In each ‘apostolic community’, all would live, learn and work together, placing everything in common, with every child earning their bread while at the same time being formed through work in an ‘honourable art’ under a ‘good quality employer’.

The Servers of the Poor, later recognised within the Church as the Order of Clerics Regular of Somasca continued St Jerome Emiliani’s style of Catholic Professional Formation, becoming the precursor for St John Bosco’s response to the industrial revolution with the creation of shoemaking and tailoring school-laboratories in 1853.

Somascan Pedagogy: 500 years of St Jerome Emiliani’s art of education

“St. Jerome [Emiliani] developed the idea that youth, in order to grow up with health — and especially the most needy — cannot be abandoned, but that love is an essential requisite. In him, love went beyond resourcefulness, and given that it was a love that arose from the very charity of God, it was full of patience and understanding: attentive, tender, ready for sacrifice, like that of a mother.” – Pope Benedict XVI, 20 July 2011

By giving his entire life and exemplary dedication as a loving Father to all in need, St Jerome Emiliani combined works of charity together with education, giving shape to a precise pedagogy that remains indispensable for those who are inspired by him today – 500 years later.

St Jerome Emiliani’s passion for life’s dignity immersed each community he established into a shared journey where everyone could find the truth about themselves and gain a sincere love for oneself, for others and above all, for Christ.

Reflecting the necessity for a true and loving relationship with God, St Jerome Emiliani ensured that he would always live and be with the members of each community, required also by his companions, in order to really grow to know each person, share their past lives with an intelligence dictated by love – like the divine intelligence of God the Father.

In this way, St Jerome Emiliani was able to provide a stable environment that respected, empathised and addressed the dignity of the human person, no matter the circumstances, and where Christ-centred foundations could be built upon with realised life projects marked at holiness and reformation. The paternal firmness and maternal tenderness of God’s love was echoed in St Jerome Emiliani’s pedagogy
which can be addressed under three broad pillars:

live by the dignified rule of work (type of work according to one’s state in life),
educate on devotion and loyalty to the values of the Catholic tradition,
create a stable atmosphere of charity with communal acceptance of all and love for the poor
Somascan Charism: “Showing the Paternal Love of God to the poor, the abandoned, the needy and thereby testifying to the world that EVERYONE is a dignified child of God.”