Saint Francis of Paola

Francis was born in 1416 in Paola, Calabria, to parents who had prayed for a child through the intercession of Saint Francis of Assisi. After a year with the Franciscans as a boy and a pilgrimage to Assisi and Rome, he began living as a hermit near Paola at about fifteen. Disciples gathered around him, and from them grew the Order of Minims, the least ones, who kept a perpetual Lenten fast as a sign of penance and humility.

His holiness and miracles made him famous across Italy. Popular tradition says that when a boatman refused him passage, he crossed the Strait of Messina to Sicily on his cloak. In 1483, at the request of Pope Sixtus IV, he went to France to attend the dying King Louis XI, and he remained there, advising kings and founding houses. He died at Plessis-lès-Tours on April 2, 1507, and was canonized in 1519.

Francis is beloved in southern Italy, especially Calabria, where Paola's sanctuary draws great crowds and processions are held in his honor. Because of the tradition of his sea crossing, Pope Pius XII named him patron of Italian seafarers in 1943.

Italian immigrant communities in the Americas, from New York to Argentina, keep his feast with Mass and processions, and many families keep the name Francesco or Francisco in his honor.