Saint Fabiola

Saint

Fabiola, known in Italian and Spanish as Santa Fabiola, was a physician and Roman matron of rank of the company of noble Roman women who, under the influence of the Church father Jerome, gave up all earthly pleasures and devoted herself to the practice of Christian asceticism and charitable work.

Fabiola belonged to the patrician Roman family of the gens Fabia. She had been married to a man who led so vicious a life that to live with him was impossible. She obtained a divorce from him according to Roman law and, contrary to the ordinances of the Catholic Church, she entered upon a second union before the death of her first husband. On the day before Easter, following the death of her second consort, she appeared before the gates of the Lateran basilica, dressed in penitential garb, and did public penance for her sin, which made a great impression upon the Christian population of Rome. The pope received her formally again into full communion with the church.

Fabiola now renounced all that the world had to offer her, and devoted her immense wealth to the needs of the poor and the sick. She erected a fine hospital at Rome, and waited on the inmates herself, and treated citizens rejected from society due to their "loathsome diseases". Besides this she gave large sums to the churches and religious communities at Rome and other places in Italy. All her interests were centered on the needs of the church and the care of the poor and suffering. In 395 she went to Bethlehem, where she lived in the hospice of the convent directed by Paula of Rome and applied herself, under the direction of Jerome, with the greatest zeal to the study and contemplation of the scriptures and to ascetic exercises. An incursion of the Huns into the eastern provinces of the empire and the quarrel which broke out between Jerome and John II, Bishop of Jerusalem respecting the teachings of Origen made residence in Bethlehem unpleasant for her and she returned to Rome. Fabiola also continued her usual personal labours in aid of the poor and sick until her death on 27 December of 399 or 400. Although Fabiola's practice of medicine was pragmatic in application, her legacy illustrates the involvement of early Christian women in the field of medicine.

Her funeral was a wonderful manifestation of the gratitude and veneration with which she was regarded by the Roman populace. Jerome wrote a eulogistic memoir of Fabiola in a letter to her relative Oceanus. Augustine of Hippo dedicated a letter to her.

Cardinal Wiseman immortalised her in his novel, Fabiola. Wiseman wrote Fabiola in part as an answer to the vigorously anti Catholic book Hypatia (1853) by Charles Kingsley. The novel was mainly intended to aid the embattled Catholic minority in England. Jean Jacques Henner painted his portrait of Fabiola (in a classical Roman profile) in 1885; the original of this idealized portrayal of the saint was lost in 1912 but the image was copied by artists around the globe in the following century. In 2008, contemporary artist Francis Alÿs mounted a traveling exhibition of over 300 of these copies from his own collection. The exhibition first ran at the Hispanic Society of America in New York City, then the LACMA in Los Angeles, going on to the National Portrait Gallery in London from May to September 2009. The collection, grown to include 514 copies of the portrait, was later on show at the Byzantine Fresco Chapel of the Menil Collection in Houston from May 21, 2016, to May 13, 2018.