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A TRADITION BLESSES EXPECTANT MOTHERS
A tradition begun almost 250 years ago in southern Italy will be continued in Brooklyn when Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio presents mothers-to-be with a handkerchief touched to a relic of St. Gerard Majella, the patron saint of childbirth, on his feast day, Sunday, Oct. 16.
The Bishop will bless and distribute the white cloth, bearing an image of the 18th-century Redemptorist lay Brother, following a Mass he will celebrate at 10:15 a.m. in Our Lady of Perpetual Help Basilica, 59th St. and Fifth Ave., Bay Ridge. The Redemptorists administer the church.
Bishop DiMarzio and his family have a special devotion to St. Gerard Majella, who spent his life in an area of Italy some 50 miles south of Naples near where the Bishop’s family had its roots. His maternal grandmother lived in Caposele, the town where the saint died.
Gerard’s hagiographers have written that in 1755, the last year of his life, he first became associated with the concerns of expectant mothers.
As Gerard emerged from the home of the Pirofalo family in the town of Oliveto Citra after a visit, a young girl hurried after him with a handkerchief, which he had inadvertently left on a chair. “Keep it, it will be useful to you some day,” he told the girl.
The girl married and was in fact at the point of dying with her first child when, after invoking her patron saints, she asked for the handkerchief of the pious Redemptorist. “Not only did the pain of delivery immediately cease,” one recorder of his life wrote, “but she experienced the joy of the immediate birth of her child.”
When news of that incident circulated among townspeople, the practice followed of passing the handkerchief to other expectant mothers. To this day, white cloths touched to Gerard’s tomb in the town of Materdomini, carry the saint’s blessing to pregnant women of the world. He died Oct. 16, 1755. # # # # #
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