Saint of the Day – 15 September – Blessed Rolando de Medici (c1330-1386) Hermit, Penitent. Born in c1330 in Milan, Italy and died on 15 September 1386 in Bargone, near Genoa in Italy. Also known as Roland, Orlando.
Born into the renoiwned and sometimes infamouse, Medici family of Milan, in 1360, Rolando, at about thirty years of age, driven by the desire for a holy life, retired to the life of a Hermit.
Rolando settled in the woods near Bargone in Genoa. He lived for twenty-six years in continuous silence, feeding on what the woods offered him and, in wintertime, he begged. But his efforts met only sad indifference or, far worse – fear and anger, because he was regarded as mad or dangerous. He was often beaten until he bled. He dressed in the habit with which he began his hermit life, then patched with leaves and finally with a goatskin.
Rolando’s life was a continuous prayer and contemplation – he contemplated his Creator in creation all around him. Exhausted by penance, he was found almost dead near the Castle of Bargone. He was taken to the Castle’s Church, where he broke his silence, during the visit of the Carmelite, Domenico de Dominicis of Cremona: here he justified his inability to receive the Sacraments during his life as a Hermit which he was then able finally to receive.
A period of rest lengthened his life for a while and he finally died on 15 September 1386. He was buried in Busseto in the Church of the Holy Trinity near to the Parish Church of St Bartholomew.
His cult grew immediately from his death, even if the Church recognised the cult of the Blessed Rolando de’ Medici only on 25 September 1853 by Pope Pius IX, after a long process of Canonisation begun in 1563. The Martyrology remembers him on 15 September.
The image below is now our Blessed Rolando but an unidentified Hermit, “The Anchorite” (1881) by Teodor Axentowicz.
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