Portal:Catholic Church/Patron Archive/July 16 2007

Alexius (Italian: Sant'Alessio; Spanish: San Alejo) is mentioned in an almost contemporary account as a nameless man who lived by begging, and sharing the alms he received with other poor people. He died in a hospital in Edessa, Mesopotamia around 430 AD. After his death, it was learned that this nameless beggar was the son of a Roman patrician who had left his bride on their wedding day to go and live a life of poverty. A narrative of this man was written shortly thereafter in Greek, with a further text being produced in Latin later.

The hagiography of Alexius sets his life of abnegation in the early 5th century. In the earliest Syriac legend, the Saint, a "Man of God" of Edessa, later named as Alexius, who lived in Edessa during the episcopate of Bishop Rabula (412-435), was a native of Rome. His cult developed in Syria and spread through the Eastern Empire by the 9th century. Only from the end of the 10th century did his name begin to appear in any liturgical books in the West.

The Greek version of his legend made Alexius the only son of Euphemianus, a wealthy Christian Roman of the senatorial class. Alexius fled his arranged marriage to follow his holy vocation. Disguised as a beggar, he lived near Edessa in Syria, accepting alms even from his own household slaves, who had been sent to look for him but did not recognize him, until a miraculous vision of the Virgin Mary singled him out as a "Man of God." Fleeing the resultant notoriety, he returned to Rome, so changed that his parents did not recognize him, but as good Christians took him in and sheltered him for seventeen years, which he spent in a dark cubbyhole beneath the stairs, praying and teaching catechism to children. After his death, his family found writings on his body which told them who he was and how he had lived his life of penance from the day of his wedding, for the love of God.

The Latin narrative makes the further claim that Alexius returned to Rome and spent the last seventeen years of his life as a servant in his father's house, sleeping in a corner under some stairs.

Attributes: holding a ladder; man lying beneath a staircase

Patronage: Alexians; beggars; belt makers; nurses; pilgrims; travellers

Prayer: