St Cajetan

Cajetan was born of noble family at Vicenza, trained well, and might easily have passed his life in respectable church administration. Instead, grace drew him toward something far harder and better. After legal study he worked at Rome in ecclesiastical service, but even before priesthood he was already turning toward a deeper spiritual life and practical works of mercy. Ordained priest in his thirties, he threw himself into the renewal of Christian life with a seriousness that marks many of the best reforming saints of the age just before and around Trent. He is closely tied here to the Oratory of Divine Love and to the care of the sick and poor, because he did not think reform began with slogans. It began with prayer, personal holiness, service, and a clergy willing to live more apostolically. From that conviction came the foundation of the Theatine clerks regular with Gian Pietro Carafa, later Pope Paul IV.

The Theatine spirit is described simply and strongly: poverty, detachment from benefices and comfort, reverent liturgical life, frequent communion, and priestly seriousness restored in practice instead of merely praised in theory. Cajetan also lived through public disorder and suffered during the sack of Rome, so his reforming life was not carried on in easy conditions. Yet the same notes keep returning in him: gentleness, confidence in divine providence, love of the altar, patience with suffering, and active charity. He was not one of the loud reformers. He was one of the saints who helped make real reform possible by first reforming life, prayer, and priestly conduct. He died in 1547, leaving behind not a large outer empire, but a deep example of priestly renewal joined to mercy.