St. John Berchmans

Who they were

John Berchmans was a Flemish shoemaker's son who entered the Jesuits at Mechelen and died a scholastic in Rome at twenty two, before ordination, and whose canonized achievement is deliberately the absence of achievement. No missions, no visions, no foundations.

His documented programme was the common rule kept with total love. My penance is community life, he said, meaning the daily friction of ordinary obligations taken on whole rather than escaped, and his companions' testimony was simply that living next to him was an argument for God. The resolve he made young, that if he did not become a saint while he was young he never would, he kept on schedule, dying of a Roman summer illness in 1621 holding his crucifix, his rosary and his rule book, the three things he said were dearest to him. The first miracle accepted for his cause was worked in Louisiana. He was canonized in 1888, and the Church named him, with St. Tarcisius, patron of altar servers.

Why people turn to St. John Berchmans

Students, seminarians and novices, with St. Stanislaus Kostka, who died at seventeen in the same order and the same city. And anyone whose spiritual life is a rule kept in obscurity, where nobody is watching and there is nothing to show for it.

How to ask their intercession

By keeping today's small rule completely. One decade, on schedule, with love, is Berchmans in miniature, and he would say that is not a smaller thing than it sounds.