Lives of Saints: Sant'Egidio, aka St Giles

Here in Trastevere, we frequently traverse the Piazza Sant’ Egidio and pass the nearby church of Sant’Egidio, and although I think we looked it up at some point the past, we were unable to recall unassisted who Sant’Egidio actually was. It turns out that the name Egidio (which I think was also probably not his actual name in life, as he is said to have been born in Greece) became transmogrified later on into the name Giles, a somewhat familiar name to us from our years of living in England—a nice English name in the pattern of Niles and Miles, that doesn’t sound very much like Egidio at all. (Nor does its French equivalent, Gilles.) Yet there are churches to St. Giles and St.-Gilles as well as Sant’Egidio and probably numerous other related names in other languages, all over Europe. (In Latin he was Ægidius.) Who, I asked myself, was this person?

St. Giles is the patron saint of the disabled. This was formerly expressed as “patron saint of cripples, lepers and beggars,” but that is no longer deemed appropriate language. He was, it seems, one of the most popular saints of the middle ages. I’m guessing that that’s because during the middle ages there were an abundance people with disabilities for which no cures or treatments had yet been discovered, and St. Giles was (purportedly) one of their number. October being National Disability Employment Awareness Month, it’s a good time to learn about the patron saint of those with disabilities.

Said to have been born in Greece and to have traveled to southern France—to the lower Rhone, near Nîmes, in the sixth century—where he became a hermit, or possibly a monk, Giles/Gilles/Egidio was walking in the woods when the red deer who according to the story provided him with milk for his vegetarian monkish diet, was shot at by the king (what king? possibly the Visigoth King Wamba—a real king from 672 to 680, whose name Wamba, probably a nickname, means “big paunch”?). The king’s arrow (we are told) missed the deer and accidentally hit Giles in the kneecap. This gave Giles a permanent limp, about which the saintly monk, or hermit, did not complain or seek compensation, which impressed the king so much that he built Giles a monastery, and to this day the abbey has relics of the saint—finger bones and whatnot—and was listed in 1998 as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

For reasons connected to the saint’s alternate identity as the patron saint of health and illness and also of infertility problems, the Abbey of St.-Gilles-du-Gard (where the Provençal name for him is Saint-Geli), remains the object of pilgrimages by women with fertility issues. (None of this explains why he is also the patron saint of Edinburgh.) The popularity of St. Giles and of his monastery at Gard may have had been boosted by the fact that the monastery is conveniently located along the Route of St. James, El Camino de Santiago de Compostela, on the way to Spain.

Further embroidery on his story says that when he was born in Greece the names of his parents were King Theodore and Queen Pelagia. Another story says that Egidio/Giles at his monastery was celebrating a mass to pardon the sins of Charlemagne when an angel came down with a letter … it’s too ridiculous, and it doesn’t fit with the fact that Giles/Egidio seems fairly reliably to have died in 710, while Charlemagne, famously crowned the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome on Christmas Day of the year 800, lived from 742, or maybe 747, to 814.

Though much of what is told about Giles is folklore, he nevertheless was a real person, and these stories are similar in character to the fable that George Washington cut down his father’s cherry tree and when confronted said, “Father, I cannot tell a lie, I cut it down with my little hatchet,” an invention that does not undercut (pardon the pun) the reality of George Washington as a historical figure. This contrasts with other popular saints like St. George of legendary dragon-slaying fame (there seems to have once been a real person named George, but there was no talk of dragons until seven or eight hundred years after that person may have lived), or St. Christopher, who carried people across a river ford and one dark night carried (unbeknownst to him) the Christ Child across the river on his shoulder, noticing with each step how miraculously much heavier the child became, and at the far side a full-grown Christ, descending from Christopher’s shoulders said that of course he was heavier, as he carried the weight of the world’s sins on his own shoulders, or words along those lines. (His name only became Christopher afterwards, as it means “bearer of Christ”; he had some other name beforehand, or he would have had, if a real person.) In 1969, after investigative research of the stories of 93 putative saints (including Saints George, Christopher, Valentine, Barbara, Ursula, Catherine of Alexandria, and the ever popular St. Chrysogonous --who ever heard of him?!--but he is said to be a martyr and there’s a church bearing his name in Trastevere) – it was concluded that none of their stories could be substantiated, so Pope Paul VI downgraded them to a more or less mythical level and revoked their commemorative feast days. (In 1961 Pope John XXIII had started the process and downgraded a number of other previous saints including Philomena.)

Meanwhile, there are a dozen churches and other religious organizations in and around Rome devoted to Sant’Egidio. The Community of St. Egidio in Trastevere, in a medium-large piazza that is a major route for pedestrian traffic as well as for limited automotive traffic, brings us back to where this post started.

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Adjacent to the entry door to the building of the Community (which appropriately is accessible via a ramp) is a touching and thought-provoking sculpture called "Homeless Jesus," whose feet have been pierced. It is accompanied by a small sign identifying the sculptor, Timothy Schmaltz, and noting that it was installed for a recent anniversary of the Community. I have found that it is a subsequent casting of a piece originally made in 2013 for a site in Toronto and since then made for numerous locations around the world.