Pope Benedict XVI Blog

Patron saint of pharmacists teaches us about God's medicine, Pope says

Vatican City, Oct 7, 2009 / 10:22 am (CNA).- During his Wednesday general audience, held for 40,000 people in St. Peter's Square, Pope Benedict XVI focused his catechesis on St. John Leonardi, the patron saint of pharmacists. This Italian saint, the Pope taught, can show us that God's medicine, his son Jesus, “is the measure of all things.”

St. John Leonardi, Pope Benedict recalled, was born in the Italian town of Diecimo in the year 1541. He studied pharmacology but abandoned it to focus on theology and was later ordained a priest.

Together with Monsignor Juan Vives and the Jesuit Martin de Funes he helped to found the Pontifical Urban College of Propaganda Fide, in which countless priests have been formed. Throughout his religious life, John Leonardi never lost his passion for pharmacology, convinced that "God's medicine, which is Jesus Christ Who was crucified and rose again, is the measure of all things," the Pope said.

The saint was also involved in advising a group of young people who in 1574 founded the Congregation of the Priests of the Blessed Virgin Reformed, later known as the Clerics Regular of the Mother of God.

"The resplendent figure of this saint invites all Christians, first and foremost priests, to strive constantly towards the 'highest measure of Christian life,' which is sanctity," the Pope said. "Indeed, it is only from faithfulness to Christ that authentic ecclesial renewal can arise.

“In those years,” Benedict XVI recalled, “in the cultural and social passage from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, the premises of contemporary culture began to be outlined, characterized by an unwarranted fracture between faith and reason which, among the negative effects it has produced, marginalized God and created the illusion of a possible complete autonomy of man, who chooses to live 'as if God did not exist.'”

"This is the crisis of modern thought which I have frequently had occasion to highlight and which often leads to forms of relativism," the Holy Father added. "John Leonardi understood what the true medicine for these spiritual ills was and he summarized it in the expression: 'Christ above all.'”
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See also from Asia News, "Pope: every reform must be made within the Church, never against it."

posted by Dr. Denice Hanley, DPM, M.Div. @ 4:18 PM