Saint John Berchmans

He was born at Diest, in Brabant, on March 13, 1599. ¹ His father, John Charles Berchmans, was a shoemaker, and his mother was Elizabeth. ³ Henry Demain, writing for the Catholic Encyclopedia, describes a boy who was kind and cheerful but also, "by natural disposition, impetuous and fickle." ¹ When he was nine his mother fell into a long and serious illness, and he spent hours each day at her bedside. ¹

The habit he is now best known for started early. The encyclopedia says that when he was hardly seven he would get up early to serve two or three Masses. ¹ The cathedral in Shreveport that bears his name quotes the reason he gave his grandmother: "I want to have the blessing of God on my lessons and so I serve two or three Masses before I go to school." ³

Money nearly ended his schooling. He was studying with other boys under the parish priest of Diest, living in the rectory, when after three years his father told him he would have to leave and learn a trade to help the family. ¹² The Jesuit profile says the pastor of the Diest béguinage offered to pay for his education if he worked as a servant, and that in 1612 he took the same arrangement in the household of Canon Froymont at Mechelen. ² The cathedral puts the move to Mechelen at fifteen. ³ Either way, he paid for his schooling by waiting on others.

When the Jesuits opened a college at Mechelen in 1615, he was sent there with the other boys from the cathedral household. ³ He joined the college's Marian sodality, and on Fridays at nightfall he would walk the Stations of the Cross through the town barefoot. ¹ Toward the end of his rhetoric course he felt called to the Society of Jesus. ¹

The sources do not agree on how his family took it. The encyclopedia says flatly that "his family was decidedly opposed." ¹ The Jesuit profile says his father was disappointed, because a diocesan priest could help support the family and a Jesuit could not, but gave his permission. ² The cathedral's biography tells a longer fight: his father came to Mechelen to talk him out of it, a Franciscan relative was enlisted to argue with him, and his father finally refused him a penny, to which John answered that he would strip off the clothes he stood in if they kept him back. ³

He was received into the novitiate at Mechelen on September 24, 1616. ¹³ A few months later his mother died, and his father gave up the shoe shop and entered the seminary; the Jesuit profile says he was ordained a priest in April 1618. ² On September 25, 1618, John took his first vows. ²³

He was sent to Antwerp to study philosophy and had been there only a few weeks when he was told to go to Rome instead. ¹² Before he could take leave of his father, his father died. ²³ The encyclopedia says he made the journey of three hundred leagues on foot, "carrying a wallet on his back"; the cathedral adds that he heard midnight Mass at Loreto on Christmas Eve. ¹³ He reached Rome on December 31. ²

At the Roman College he studied philosophy for two years and passed into the third-year class in 1621. ¹ The Jesuit profile says he did well enough to be chosen to defend the entire course of philosophy in a public disputation on July 8, and was then picked to represent the college at a second disputation in August at the Greek College, which the encyclopedia notes was run by the Dominicans at the time. ¹²

That was the end of his strength. The encyclopedia says he opened the August disputation "with great perspicuity and erudition" and came home with a violent fever. ¹ The Jesuit profile gives a fuller course: dysentery on August 7, then fever, then inflamed lungs, with visits from his fellow scholastics and from the Father General. ² He asked for his crucifix, his rosary and his book of rules, spent his last night in prayer, and died on the morning of August 13, 1621. ² He was twenty-two years and five months old. ¹

There is no great deed to report, and the encyclopedia does not pretend there is one. What set him apart, Demain writes, was "his intense love for the rules of his order," and he quotes him: "If I do not become a saint when I am young, I shall never become one." ¹ Another saying is remembered in two forms. The encyclopedia gives it as "My penance is to live the common life." ¹ Pope Francis, speaking to the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians in 2021, put it as "My greatest penance is community life," and added that "it takes a lot of penance to tolerate one another." ⁵

The Jesuit profile sums him up as someone who "personifies the ideal that ordinary deeds done extraordinarily well lead to great holiness." ² When he died, the encyclopedia says, crowds came for days to see him, and that same year Philip, Duke of Aerschot, petitioned Gregory XV to open his cause. ¹ He was declared Blessed in 1865 and canonized on January 15, 1888, by Leo XIII, in the same ceremony as Peter Claver and Alphonsus Rodriguez. ¹³

One of the miracles accepted for his canonization took place in Louisiana. ³⁶ Mary Wilson, a young convert from Canada, had come to the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Grand Coteau in September 1866 as a postulant, sent south in the hope that the climate would help her poor health. ⁶ It did not. She went into the infirmary on October 19, and by December, by her own sworn account, she had eaten almost nothing for some forty days and could no longer speak without bleeding from the mouth. ⁶ The community made a novena to Blessed John Berchmans. ³

Her account, which the Society of the Sacred Heart prints in full, describes a voice, relief, and then a figure at her bedside: "I closed my eyes and asked: 'Is it Blessed Berchmans?' He answered: Yes, I come by the order of God. Your sufferings are over. Fear not!" ⁶ The academy's house journal recorded it on December 14, 1866, in one line, adding that "three days later this dear sister received the religious habit." ⁷ Her doctor, in a sworn statement of February 4, 1867, wrote that he was "unable to explain the transition by any ordinary natural laws." ⁶ The infirmary is now a chapel, the Shrine of St. John Berchmans, and pilgrims still visit it. ⁶⁷

Saint John Berchmans is the patron saint of altar servers and students, according to the Cathedral of St. John Berchmans in Shreveport, which also calls him patron of youth and says that Pius IX gave him the title "Patron of Altar-Boys." ³ The fit is plain enough. He was serving Mass at seven, and at the Roman College he kept serving a long daily Mass that cost him study time without asking to be moved. ¹³ He died a student, weeks after defending the whole course of philosophy in public. ¹²

The feast of Saint John Berchmans is kept on November 26. ³ It was formerly August 13, the day he died in 1621, and the Shreveport cathedral still marks both, calling August 13 "his date of death and the Feast Day from the old calendar." ³ Vatican News's Saint of the Day calendar lists him under August 13. ⁴ The 1910 encyclopedia gives his death date but names no feast. ¹

There is very little in this life to admire from a distance. He served Mass, studied, kept the rule of a house full of other young men, and died before he was ordained. The encyclopedia does not dress that up; it describes his holiness almost entirely in terms of the ordinary, in duties done, rules kept and superiors obeyed. ¹

His saying about the common life is worth taking at face value. The penance he named was living with other people, and Pope Francis read it the same way, as the daily work of tolerating one another. ¹⁵ It asks nothing exotic of anyone who lives in a family, a dormitory or a parish.

The money is part of the story too. He nearly lost his schooling because his family could not afford it, kept it by working as a servant, and then chose a religious order that meant he could never help support them. ² The sources disagree about how hard his father fought that choice, and none of them says the cost was small. ¹²³

He also died young and unfinished. The Jesuit profile says the effort of studying for his examinations had already worn down his health before the disputations that came last. ² Students who ask his prayers are asking them of someone who never finished his course, and whom the sources remember for the way he kept at it. ¹²