St. Fabiola, Bigamist

[Died 399] FEAST DAY: December 27

Statues of 140 saints stand along the edge of the great colonnade that embraces St. Peter’s Square in Rome. Unrecognized in this crowd is a statue of St. Fabiola, a woman few Christians have even heard of. Fabiola, once notorious as a public sinner, and then illustrious as one of the most charitable Christians in Rome, has been lost in the crowd of thousands upon thousands of saints who have come after her.

She might have slipped our notice completely were it not for St. Jerome, who knew Fabiola and wrote her eulogy.

Fabiola was a Christian and a patrician. No doubt her husband came from a distinguished family as well, but we do not know if he was a Christian. We do not even know his name. We do know that he made Fabiola miserable, cheating on her on an epic scale. Jerome says the man’s adulteries were so numerous, so flagrant “not even a prostitute or a common slave could have put up with them.”

There came a point when Fabiola would tolerate it no longer. She divorced her husband.

While a Catholic may separate from a spouse, he or she is forbidden to divorce and remarry. Christ himself forbade it in St. Matthew’s gospel, yet Fabiola defied this law. She was still a young woman. She found it too hard to live without the company of a man, so she obtained a civil divorce from her first husband and, in a civil ceremony, married another, better man.

The Church could not recognize Fabiola’s divorce or her civil marriage. Her actions, although understandable, placed Fabiola in the category of a persistent sinner and barred her from receiving the sacraments. For a prominent Christian patrician to flout the laws of the Church caused a public scandal.

Then the unexpected happened: Fabiola’s second husband died. She had already placed herself outside the Church; she could have married for a third time if she wanted. But grace touched Fabiola’s heart. One Sunday she appeared among the penitents outside Rome’s Lateran Basilica, the church that is the pope’s cathedral. In the fourth century repentance and absolution were much more public than they are today. Sinners did not slip into a private confessional; they came to Sunday Mass dressed in miserable clothes, unwashed and unkempt, so everyone in the congregation would know that they repented the wickedness they had done. St. Jerome describes the scene, saying noble Fabiola appeared before the throng of Christians with “disheveled hair, pale features, soiled hands and unwashed neck.” That Sunday, the pope absolved her of her sins.

Now that she was restored to the Church, Fabiola devoted herself to good works. She sold her jewels, her land, everything she owned. With the money from the sale of her property she opened the first hospital in the West, nursing, washing, and feeding the patients herself. Her wealth was so extensive, however, that Fabiola could expand her work, endowing monasteries and convents, clothing the poor of Rome, and supporting invalids.

With her hospital up and running, Fabiola decided to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. That is how she met St. Jerome: he had settled in Bethlehem, where he was working on the authoritative Latin translation of the Bible that has come to be called the Vulgate. Fabiola charmed Jerome, who could be thin-skinned, cantankerous, and difficult to get along with. She lingered in Bethlehem, and they became good friends. Jerome thought Fabiola might stay in the Holy Land permanently, but when the Huns invaded Syria and Palestine, Fabiola fled back to Rome. Soon afterward she died.

Her funeral was more like an old Roman triumph for a conquering hero than a requiem. The churches were thronged with mourners praying for her soul, and as her body was carried through Rome to its tomb, “the streets, porches, and roofs from which a view could be obtained were inadequate to accommodate the spectators.” Her friend St. Jerome wrote what could be her epitaph, “Where sin hath abounded, grace hath much more abounded.”