St. Cajetan: Feast Day, Patronage & Prayers
Feast day: August 7 (optional memorial)
Patron of: Job seekers, the unemployed, and workers.
About St. Cajetan
St. Cajetan, in Italian Gaetano dei Conti di Thiene, was born in 1480 in Vicenza, in northern Italy. He earned a doctorate in law at Padua and served in the papal court in Rome, but he was drawn to a deeper life and was ordained a priest in 1516. He joined the Oratory of Divine Love, a brotherhood of priests and laypeople devoted to prayer and to serving the sick and poor, and he worked in hospitals caring for patients with incurable diseases.
Deeply troubled by the worldliness of many clergy in his day, Cajetan founded in 1524, with Gian Pietro Carafa, the future Pope Paul IV, the Congregation of Clerics Regular, known as the Theatines. They lived in poverty, trusted completely in God's providence without begging, and worked to renew the clergy and the faithful through preaching and the sacraments. Cajetan also founded pawnshops that lent money to the poor at no interest, to protect them from moneylenders. He died in Naples in 1547 and was canonized in 1671. In Argentina and elsewhere, crowds visit his shrines each August to pray for work and daily bread.
Prayers to St. Cajetan on Daily Catholic Prayers
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