Blessed Marcolin of Forli

From the novitiate, he attained a degree of virtue that made him, for those who saw him, the accomplished model of religious perfection. His exactitude in following the rule was extreme, his zeal in practicing poverty and obedience very keen, his love of retreat and solitude remarkable; but what dominated above all in him was his singular taste for humility: he wished only to be hidden, and the last of all. He guarded his senses with very great care; always in fasts, in vigils, and in other mortifications of the flesh, he kept perpetually an irreproachable innocence of life, a perfect purity of soul and body.

He possessed the gift of prayer and contemplation to an eminent degree; he spent a great part of the day and night on his knees, the gaze of his soul fixed upon God; very thick calluses formed on his knees, which were noticed after his death. He appeared rapt in a perpetual ecstasy, and sometimes so profound that he saw or heard nothing more. When he officiated at the altar, divine charity held him so much under its ardent influence that he lost the use of his senses, and was compelled to remain in a long and complete immobility. The abundant tears he shed then contributed to the conversion of more than one sinner.

He rendered a si ngular cult to the Vierge Mère de Dieu Mother of Jesus, who appeared to Bertrand. Virgin Mother of God, and was animated towards her with a truly filial love; it was believed among the people that he had miraculous conversations with an image of the Mother of God, an image which is still piously preserved today. Entirely devoted to the good of his neighbor, he was regarded as the father of the poor, and he rendered to everyone all the charitable duties that he could.

These gifts and graces from above with which he was filled, he hid throughout his life with such care that he passed for a man of great simplicity. This life hidden with Jes us Christ in Jésus-Christ Italian Dominican friar of the 14th century, known for his humility and mystical life. God, he ended most holily at the age of eighty, after having announced the day of his death, in the year 1387.

The death of the holy man having been divulged in the city by a child who remained unknown, a considerable gathering of people formed around his tomb; it was necessary to exhume him to give free course to the veneration of this crowd. His cult, thus begun, was perpetuated and increased, and Benedict XIV approved it upon a consultation of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, and permitted the celebration of the Mass and the Office in his honor in the diocese o f Forli and thro diocèse de Forli City where the saint has been honored from time immemorial. ughout the Order of Preachers.

Dominican Breviary.