Saint Seraphin of Montegranaro

He was born at Montegranaro, near Ascoli Piceno, around 1540, and baptized Felix. ¹² CapDox says he was the second of four children and that his father was a builder; the encyclopedia calls the family poor and pious. ¹² Because he was frail, his father sent him to work for a farmer, who gave him the flock to mind. ² The encyclopedia notes that shepherding left him a great deal of time to pray, and CapDox says it was there, in the quiet of the countryside, that he found he loved it. ¹²

After their father died, his eldest brother took over the building trade and called Felix home to work as a laborer. ² He was not suited to it, and CapDox says he had to put up with "non-stop rebukes and blows" from a brother with a short temper. ² The encyclopedia, which has both parents dead by then, describes the treatment as harsh and cruel. ¹

He had heard the lives of the desert hermits read aloud and wanted that kind of life. ² When he said so to a devout young woman from Loro Piceno, she told him about the Capuchins. ² He went at once to the friary at Tolentino, was not taken as quickly as he hoped, and eventually began his novitiate near Jesi, where he received the name Seraphin. ² The encyclopedia says he was sixteen when he entered; CapDox says eighteen. ¹²

Years later, ordered by a superior at Civitanova to explain "the means by which he acquired such perfection," Seraphin told the story himself, and a friar who heard it repeated it in a deposition in 1627. ² He said he had been amazed to be accepted at all, being "a person who was unable to do anything." ² His first guardian wanted the house to run like clockwork, and Seraphin did every job he was given badly, so the penances came one after another. ² He was tempted to leave the order. ²

One day, praying in front of the Blessed Sacrament, he complained: if he was not suitable, why had they admitted him, and if they had, why did they afflict him so? ² By his account a voice answered, "Br. Serafino, isn't this the road on which to serve me, who have suffered so much for the redemption of mankind?" ² He decided from then on to say a decade of the rosary every time something was said or done against his own wishes. ²

That, CapDox concludes, was the whole secret: "Self-denial and self-abasement." ² He spent his life as porter or questor, the friar who keeps the door or begs for the house, at Loro Piceno, Corinaldo, Ostra, Ancona, Sant'Elpidio and Montolmo, and longest of all at Ascoli, which came to think of him as its own. ² He never left the Marches. ²

The encyclopedia says he was set apart from the start by simplicity, mortification and obedience, and by a charity to the poor that "knew no bounds." ¹ He had a special devotion to the Eucharist and to Our Lady. ¹ CapDox says he would have liked to live at Loreto or in Rome so that he could serve more Masses each day. ² From that devotion, it says, came the rest: his short exhortations, his compassion for the sick and the poor, his work at making peace in families and in the town, and a desire, never granted, to go on mission and die a martyr. ²

He was always seen with two things: a small brass crucifix and a rosary. ² He held out the crucifix for people to kiss, CapDox says, as "a clever ruse so that they would not kiss his hand or his habit." ² The rosary he made himself out of fennel stems and bits of pumpkin, and people trusted it more than all the doctors in town. ²

He spent more of the night in the chapel than in his cell. ² If he noticed someone watching, he pretended to be asleep and snored loudly; when a friar scolded him for it, he answered, "I sleep more in the chapel than in the refectory." ² Though he was almost illiterate, when obedience made him speak in the refectory on the psalm Qui habitat or on the Stabat Mater, he reduced everyone to tears. ²

The encyclopedia says he could read the secrets of hearts and had the gifts of miracles and prophecy, and that "although unlettered, his advice was sought by secular and ecclesiastical dignitaries." ¹ CapDox says the testimony for his cause is a near-continuous list of healings, so many that one guardian ordered him to stop. ² People who knew him also remembered the man, and not a plaster saint: "His beard and hair were always ruffled … his breath smelled dreadful … his habit, covered in patches, always slipped down a little on his left side," and "he had a great love for flowers and children." ²

CapDox sets him beside Felix of Cantalice, the first of the Capuchin lay brothers to be honored as a saint, and says a reader hardly needs to be told how alike they were. ² The Capuchin chronicler Zaccaria Boverio wrote of him in the order's annals that "in the Province of the Marches there is now one star that shines more brightly than the others in the Order. This is Br. Serafino da Montegranaro." ²

He died at Ascoli on the afternoon of October 12, 1604. ¹² CapDox says it was the children who told the town, running through the streets crying, "The saint has died! The saint has died!" ² He is buried in the Capuchin friary at Ascoli. ¹

Testimony about him was gathered from 1610, the first process closed in 1624, and the apostolic process ran to 1632. ² He was beatified by Benedict XIII in 1729 and canonized by Clement XIII on July 16, 1767. ¹²

None of the sources consulted for this page names Saint Seraphin of Montegranaro as patron of anything, and the page does not supply a patronage. ¹² CapDox calls Ascoli his adopted city, and says he was often called Brother Seraphin of Ascoli. ²

Saint Seraphin of Montegranaro's feast is October 12, the day he died in 1604. ¹³ The Catholic Encyclopedia says it is kept in the Franciscan Order on that day, and Vatican News and the Secular Franciscan calendar list him there too. ¹³⁴

The part of his life worth sitting with is the part he told himself. He was a novice who could not do the work, under a superior who punished him for it, and he wanted to go home. ² What changed was the way he took the next correction, and not his skill at the jobs: a decade of the rosary, every time, for years. ²

He was not tidy about holiness. He snored in chapel to throw people off, his habit slipped, his breath was bad, and he used a crucifix to keep people from kissing his hand. ² The same man left a room of friars in tears talking about the Stabat Mater. ²

His whole life fit inside one small region of Italy, and most of it was spent at a door or on a begging round. ² It was enough for the children of Ascoli to know who had died when he did. ²