Saint Fabiola

Nearly everything known about Fabiola is in one letter. The life of her on santiebeati says that Jerome's Letter 77, written to her relative Oceanus after her death, is the only biographical source. ⁵ The 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia follows it closely. ¹ Jerome begins it by saying he will not praise her ancestors, "a stock famous in history," but start "from the cradle of her conversion and of her penitence." ²

She belonged to the patrician family of the Fabii. ¹⁵ She was not, Kirsch notes, one of the circle of ascetic women who gathered around Jerome during his years in Rome, 382 to 384; her turn came later. ¹

She had been married to a man whose life was so vicious, Kirsch says, that living with him was impossible. ¹ She divorced him under Roman law and, contrary to the Church's rule, married again while he was still alive. ¹ Jerome defends the separation and will not name the husband's sins, which he says the whole neighborhood knew and his wife alone refused to disclose. ² The second marriage he does not defend: "I readily admit this to have been a fault." ² She was young, he says, and did not know that the Gospel forbids remarriage while the first husband lives. ²

After her second husband died she did public penance. ¹² On the day before Easter, Kirsch writes, she came to the Lateran basilica in penitential dress. ¹ Jerome describes her standing in the ranks of the penitents before bishop, presbyters and people, "all of whom wept when they saw her weep," with her hair loose, her face pale and her hands unwashed. ² The pope, Kirsch says, formally received her back into full communion. ¹

The sources describe that moment differently. Jerome and Kirsch speak of a Christian readmitted to communion after her fault. ¹² Vatican News and the Avvenire notice on santiebeati write as though she became a Christian then, being widowed a second time. ⁵⁷

What she did next is the reason Jerome wrote. She broke up and sold all the property she could, which was large, and spent the money on the poor. ² "She was the first person to found a hospital," he writes, "into which she might gather sufferers out of the streets, and where she might nurse the unfortunate victims of sickness and want." ²

She did the nursing herself. Jerome says she often carried on her own shoulders people others would not touch, washed wounds that men could not bear to look at, fed her patients with her own hand, and wet the lips of the dying. ² Kirsch puts it plainly: she waited on the inmates herself, not even shunning those with repulsive wounds and sores. ¹ She also supported monasteries, clergy and virgins, and sent her alms round the islands and along the coast where communities of monks lived. ² Kirsch adds that she gave large sums to churches and religious communities in Rome and elsewhere in Italy. ¹

Against the advice of all her friends she sailed for the Holy Land, and for a short time Jerome was her host. ² Kirsch dates the journey to 395 and says she lived in the hospice of the convent directed by Paula; santiebeati dates it to 394. ¹⁵ Jerome remembers her reading through the Prophets, Gospels and Psalms, asking questions and keeping the answers. ² One day, reading the book of Numbers, she asked him the meaning of each of the stopping places of the Israelites in the wilderness; he answered some with confidence and some doubtfully, admitted he did not know others, and she made him promise to write a book on them. ²

News came that the Huns were sweeping through the East. ² Jerome and his companions manned ships and lay off the coast in case the invaders reached them, and there was dissension among the Christians of Palestine besides. ²³ Kirsch names it as the quarrel between Jerome and Bishop John of Jerusalem over Origen. ¹ Before she sailed for Italy, the New Advent editors say, Jerome finished for her a treatise on the vestments of the high priest, his Letter 64, dated 396 or 397. ³ The Avvenire notice says instead that she went home because Germanic peoples were invading from the north. ⁵

She went back to Rome to live in poverty where she had been rich, to lodge in another person's house after lodging so many in her own. ² There she joined the former senator Pammachius, Kirsch says, in a great charitable undertaking: a large hospice at Portus for pilgrims coming to Rome. ¹ Jerome tells it as a contest. Each wanted to set up the tent of Abraham at Portus; in the end they combined their money and their plans, "for what each had desired to effect alone both accomplished together." ² Writing to Pammachius about the same hospice, Jerome praised him for building at Portus a house of bread to rival Bethlehem. ⁴

Sensing that her end was near, she wrote to several monks asking them to come and relieve her of what she still owned, and they came. ² When she died, Jerome says, the whole city gathered for her funeral; psalms were sung and the gilded ceilings rang with Alleluia. ² Streets, porches and roofs could not hold the people who came to watch. ²

Kirsch gives the date as December 27, 399 or 400. ¹ The New Advent editors of Letter 77 and the Avvenire notice both give 399; Salboni, on santiebeati, gives 400 and dates the letter to the summer of that year. ²⁵ With the letter Jerome sent Oceanus the book on the stopping places in the wilderness, which he had been writing at her request when she died. ²

Salboni adds two notes on her memory. Her name appeared in martyrologies on December 27 only from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, and Baronius did not include her in the Roman Martyrology; the current Martyrology does commemorate her. ⁵⁶ Her wider fame, he says, comes from Cardinal Wiseman's 1855 novel Fabiola, whose heroine is a witness of the last persecutions and not the penitent widow of the late fourth century. ⁵

No source consulted for this page names a patronage for Saint Fabiola, and none is claimed here. ¹⁵⁶ The Martyrology remembers her for a life of penance turned to the good of the poor. ⁶

Saint Fabiola's feast is December 27. ⁵⁶ The current Roman Martyrology commemorates her that day as a Roman widow who, by Jerome's testimony, turned her life of penance to the benefit of the poor, and Vatican News lists her on the same day. ⁶⁷ Kirsch gives December 27 as the day she died. ¹

Her story begins with a fault, and Jerome does not hide it. ² He defends what he can, admits what he cannot, and then spends most of the letter on what came after. ²

Her penance was public, in front of the people who knew her, and Jerome says they wept with her. ² What followed was not a retreat from the city. She sold what she had and took the sick in off its streets. ²

She was restless. She sailed east against everyone's advice and came back when the East became dangerous. ² In Rome, Jerome says, she called the city walls a prison and longed to be alone, and gave away what she had left with her own hands. ² She asked hard questions about Scripture and would not accept a vague answer. ²

Jerome closes by saying that the one who is forgiven more loves more. ² He meant it of her.