St. Roch & Cholera

In Montpellier, France toward the close of the 13th Century was born one Roch, son of the town's wealthy governor. Orphaned, Roch gave away his fortune, set out for Rome as a mendicant pilgrim. In town after town on the way, plagues miraculously disappeared upon his advent. But in Piacenza he fell ill himself, was expelled to a forest where he would have died save for the devoted ministrations of a dog. Roch died in his 30s, was identified by a red cross which, according to tradition, had been on his breast at birth. Roman Catholics came to believe God had given Roch the power of healing the plague-stricken, and he was canonized even before the city of Constance was delivered from cholera in 1414 by prayers for his intercession. Last week brought the feast (Aug. 16) of St. Roch and in Pittsburgh was commemorated what Catholics believe to have been a miracle as ineffable as any the saint invoked during his life.

In the 1840s and 1850s the U. S. was periodically swept by Asiatic cholera. In 1849, polluted drinking water brought it to Pittsburgh where in two or three weeks it killed some 5,000 of the city's 45,000 inhabitants. Business activities ceased, citizens barred themselves indoors, while carts rumbled off with the dead, and hydrants gushed to rid the town of its foulness. Among the devout who tolled their church bells and prayed for deliverance were the Catholics of St. Michael's parish on the South Side, who addressed their supplications to St. Roch and the Blessed Virgin, vowing that if they were spared they would devote a day to the two every year forever.* Not a single parishioner of St. Michael's was stricken then or in the second plague which swept Pittsburgh in 1853

Last week on the South Side, now a congested mill district, for the 88th time solemn high mass was celebrated in St. Michael's for hundreds of Catholics, some of them sons and grandsons of those delivered from the plague, some of them old parishioners who traveled hundreds of miles for the event. All were permitted to kiss the church's prized reliquary containing a bit of one of St. Roch's bones.

* Because the feast of St. Roch falls within the octave--eight-day observance--of the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin (Aug. 15), the two can be conveniently celebrated together.

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