Saint Alexis

Catholic Saint

st.Alexis-Mystic and confessor known as “the Man of God”

Feast Day : July 17 (in the West); March 17 (in the East)

Name meaning: Defender, helper Also known as: Alexis, Alexios, Alessio

Patronage: beggars; belt makers; against earthquakes; against lightning; nurses; pilgrims; against storms; travelers

There are no traces of Alexis in any early Western martyrology or liturgy. He apparently was an Eastern or Byzantine saint venerated in Rome during the 10th century. Alexis was born in Rome to Euphemanius and Aglaia, a wealthy senator and his wife. The child devoted himself to God, but bowed to his parents’ wishes that he marry. Apparently the ceremony took place, but Alexis who had seen a vision of St. Paul calling him to service could not live with his bride. She agreed to release him and he fled Rome for Edessa, in Syria, on his wedding night. For 17 years Alexis lived in a shack next to the church of Bishop Rabula, begging for alms only in the evening, sharing his meager resources with the poor and keeping his identity a secret. At the end of that time, however, a statue of the Virgin apparently called on the people of Edessa to “seek the Man of God,” and Alexis fled the city for Tarsus, following his early vision of Paul.

A storm stopped his voyage, and he was rescued and taken to Rome. Filled with desire to see his family, Alexis returned to his father’s estate but was not recognized by his parents or bride, who lived with her in-laws. They allowed Alexis to minister to the peasants and children and to live beneath the stairs of the house, where he remained anonymous for another 17 years. At the end of that 17-year period, another voice spoke to Pope Innocent I (r. 401–417), calling him to “seek the Man of God.” The pope traced the voice to Euphemanius’s house, to a cupboard under the stairs. There lay Alexis, dead, clutching a parchment letter explaining who he was and how much he loved his family. Scholars now believe that the story of Alexis became confused over time with that of St. John Calybata, a Roman nobleman with a similar history. But accounts from the ninth century tell of a poor monk in Edessa, supposedly with patrician Roman parents, who lived as a beggar and died there, buried in a common pauper’s grave. Pope Benedict VII (r. 974–983) gave the exiled metropolitan of the Byzantine Church, Sergius of Damascus, the crumbling church of St. Boniface on the Aventine in Rome. Sergius erected a monastery and added Alexis’s name as patron of the church and monastery. The church still stands, renovated many times, and reportedly contains the remains of the staircase under which Alexis lived, in his own father’s house.