SAINT ROCK

In this time of COVID-19 pandemic, San Roque or Saint Rock, has become popular to the Catholic faithful. He is popularly known to be especially invoked against plagues.

Saint Rock  is known as the patron saint of dogs, falsely accused people, invalids,  bachelors, and several other
things.

He was born in Montpellier as a son of the noble governor of the city.  Even his birth was accounted a miracle, for his noble mother had been barren. She prayed to the Virgin Mary and her prayer was granted. His breast was miraculously marked with a red cross on his breast that grew as he did. Younger as he was, he began to manifest strict asceticsm and great devoutness. When his mother fasted twice a week, he would abstain twice a week also.

When his parents died in his twentieth year, he distributed all his worldly goods among the poor like St. Francis of Assisi, though his father on his death bed had ordained him governor of Montpellier. He set out as a mendicant pilgrim for Rome. In Italy during an epidemic plague, he was very diligent in tending the sick in the public hospital at Acquapendente, Cesena. Rimni,Novara and Rome. He is said to have effected many miraculous cures by prayer and the sign of the cross and the touch of his hand.

At Rome, he preserved the "cardinal of Angleria in Lombardy by making a sign of the cross on his forehead, which miraculously remained.  Ministering at Piacenza he himself finally fell ill. He was expelled from the town; and withdrew into the forest, where he made himself a hut of boughs and leaves, which was miraculously supplied with water by a spring that arose in the place. He would have perished had not a dog belonging to a nobleman named Gothard Palastrelli supplied him with bread and licked his wounds, healing them. Count Gothard, following his hunting dog that carried the bread, discovered Saint Roch and became his acolyte.

On his return incognito to Montpellier he was arrested as a spy (by orders of his own uncle) and thrown into prison, where he languished five years and died on 16 August 1327, without revealing his name, to avoid worldly glory.

 After his death, according to the Golden Legend;

An angel brought from heaven a table divinely written with letters of gold into the prison, which he laid under the head of S. Rocke. And in that table was written that God had granted to him his prayer, that is to wit, that who that calleth meekly to S. Rocke he shall not be hurt with any hurt of pestilence

The townspeople recognized him as well by his birthmark. He was soon canonized in the popular mind, and a great church erected in veneration.

The date (1327) asserted by Francesco Diedo for Saint Roch's death would precede the traumatic advent of the Black Death in Europe (1347–49) after long centuries of absence, for which a rich iconography of the plague, its victims and its protective saints was soon developed, in which the iconography of Roche finds its historical place: previously the topos did not exist. In contrast, however, St. Roch of Montpellier cannot be dismissed based on dates of a specific plague event. In medieval times, the term "plague" was used to indicate a whole array of illnesses and epidemics.

 The  Council of Constance was threatened with plague in 1414, public processions and prayers for the intercession of Roch were ordered, and the outbreak ceased.