Blessed John the Barefoot

After having governed his parish until 1316, he felt so strongly drawn to the Order of Saint Francis that, resolved to the sacrifice that God inspired in him, he went to place his parish in the hands of his bishop and ask for permission to embrace the institute of the Friars. The bishop could not receive without tears a resignation that deprived him of a subject of such extraordinary merit. Having unsuccessfully sought to dissuade John from his resolution, he wished at least to show him his consideration by conferring the parish upon his brother. But John, entirely detached from the bonds of flesh and blood, and who moreover knew the unworthiness of the subject, made it his duty to reveal his faults to the bishop and to beg him to choose another Pastor.

Equipped with the blessing of his Prelate, he entered, in 1316, into the Order of Saint Francis at the convent of Quimper. If he had loved poverty before making a public profession of it, he gave himself to it with ardor once it had become an obligation for him. His clothes were always the worst; and, if he were asked the reason, he would reply that it was because he was the most imperfect of all, and consequently unworthy of being dressed decently and in new garments. Persuaded that his Rule promised some particular blessing to those who did not disdain to mend their own clothes themselves, he took pleasure in sewing patches onto his own; and the more unpleasant and poorly placed these patches appeared, the more his humility found satisfact ion in the Frère Jean Secular priest who became a Franciscan friar, famous for his asceticism and charity. m. Brother John, even poorer than the voluntary poor, his confreres, did not see in his own destitution reasons to close his heart to mercy, and his hands to the inclination that led him to give alms. His industrious charity found resources to relieve the miserable; he was constantly surrounded by them, and he consoled them all effectively. He sometimes gave them his own cloak and hood, and did not fear for that reason that his Father Saint Francis would fail to recognize, due to t Père saint François Founder of the Order of Friars Minor. he lack of some livery of penance, one of his own clothed interiorly with the new man.

The charity of this excellent religious did not find that helplessness was a sufficient pretext to excuse him from doing good to the poor, especially when public miseries increased the needs of individuals. Then his zeal, taking on new strength, led him to use gentle force upon the wealthy; he would insinuate to them so vividly the great advantages that religion promises to almsgiving, and the necessity that the Gospel imposes to perform it, that the same fire by which he was consumed was also kindled in their hearts.

Time was dear and precious to him; he did not give a single instant of it to idleness; his days were full, and he was found constantly occupied with work, prayer, or some exercise of piety. He rose every night long before the others: his eyes opened to God always preceded the night vigils, and, once Matins were finished, he found it difficult to leave the sanctuary; the day often surprised him there in the continuation of his prayer. As soon as he had said Mass, he would enter the confessional, or go to visit the sick of the city. The rest of the day, with a good part of the night, he spent in prayer. It was not enough for his fervent piety to say the canonical office in the choir with the community; he also said it in private, most often alone, sometimes with one of his brethren, always bareheaded, with profound respect and affectionate attention. Besides the great Office, he recited in addition that of the Cross, that of the Holy Spirit, the Gradual Psalms and those of penance, the Office of the Dead, and a great number of litanies, hymns, and canticles in honor of the Blessed Virgin.

Some miraculous effects of his prayers for the healing of bodies and spirits are reported; and it is not surprising that a man so full of faith was heard. His virtue was tested, like that of Job, by the interior and exterior attacks of the demon, which sometimes sought to cast him into discouragement and lukewarmness, and at other times assailed his very body, already exhausted by the rigors of penance. The shield of faith, and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, were the weapons with which, following the example of his Savior, he used to overcome and drive away this dangerous enemy. The divine canticles of the son of Jesse had formerly dampened the efforts of the evil spirit that tormented Saul: they also provided this holy religious with the means to win similar victories. Sometimes he would say: "O God! deliver my soul from the sword, deliver this desolate soul from these furious ones"; and, to mark the contempt he held for his tempter, he often used the term dog. At other times he would say: "Touch not my anointed, and do no evil to my prophets"; or else: "Depart from me, all you who work iniquity, for the Lord has heard the voice of my tears"; or these other words: "Let all my enemies be utterly confounded."

But, for fear that the external enemy might maintain intelligence with the domestic enemy, the blessed John applied himself particularly to subduing the latter through extraordinary austerities. He spent sixteen whole years without drinking wine, except at the altar, and without eating meat, unless forced by illness, by the orders of physicians, or the commands of his superiors. He even ate fish very rarely. He fed on coarse barley bread or beans, which he let go moldy on purpose, so as to find it less pleasant. He avoided pleasure even in the water he drank, and corrupted its taste by mixing in some sour or bitter liquor, in memory of the vinegar and gall with which his Savior had been given to drink on Calvary. He ate only once a day, unless he was sick and currently bedridden; with the exception of forty days, he fasted the rest of the year, which he had divided into eight Lents, the first of which began the day after Epiphany and lasted forty days, during which he lived only on bread, most often quite dry, and sometimes soaked in broth, and drank only water. The second Lent was that of the Church; he observed it entirely, fasting on bread and water. The third, which he called the Lent of Moses, also lasted forty days, and, with the exception of three days a week when he took soup, for all the rest, as well as the ten days before Pentecost, he fasted on bread and water. The fourth Lent, which was in honor of the apostles Saint Peter and Saint Paul, began forty days before their feast, and he often fasted on bread and water. The fifth was that of Our Lady, which lasted until her Assumption, and that one was as harsh as the great Lent. He observed the same austerity during the sixth, in honor of the holy Angels, which ended on Michaelmas. The seventh lasted until All Saints' Day, with the austerities of the third. The last, which is that of the Rule of the Friars Minor, he began on All Souls' Day, and continued until Christmas Day, always on bread and water.

He had three kinds of hair shirts, one of which was woven from co Règle des Frères Mineurs Global order in which Raynier is honored. arse hemp tow, which is called reparon in Brittany, and which makes a cloth more fit to flay the toughest skin than to serve as clothing. The other was of horsehair; and the third, which this holy man, ingenious at tormenting himself, had invented himself, was of pigskin, the hair of which was cut to two or three lines from the surface; which caused him pains that one cannot think of without shuddering. But what shall we say of the constancy with which he left in his always bare feet the nails that accidentally pierced them while walking? He was often seen with his feet ready to rot, due to accidents of this nature, without him complaining of what he was suffering, and without him taking the trouble to remove the cause of the evil, had the express orders of his superiors not compelled him to do so.

Vermine is a kind of scourge that often causes the patience of the most perfect to fail, who believe they are only satisfying what public decency demands, when it is perhaps only too true that they are gladly escaping an importunate penance that is not of their choosing. Great Saints have seen more merit in this involuntary penance than in those where self-love can flatter itself with the invention. The blessed John, following their example, respected the finger of God in these little domestic executioners, and far from destroying them, he regarded himself as their shepherd, and put back into the fold those that were in danger of straying and getting lost.

Masters of the spiritual life highly esteem the gift of tears and compunction; and indeed, if one of the characteristics of the impious, according to Saint Paul, is to be without affection, why should one not regard it as a favor that God grants to His elect to give them a heart of flesh, a soul sensitive to the things of the other life, and a tender and easy outpouring of tears at the consideration of objects worthy of piety? It was through these principles of a holy and supernatural tenderness that the Blessed John shed such abundant tears in prayer, in the exercise of his office as confessor, and over the public evils that the prophetic spirit caused him to foresee. It was thus that, foreseeing one day, during the common meal where food had no part in the attention of his mind, the evils that the civil war in Brittany would cause after the death of Duke John III, he not only soaked his bread with his tears, but spent the rest of the day weeping with such great effusion that one would have said his eyes had become two fountains. He foresaw and announced the siege and capture of Quimper, and the cruel famine that wa siège et la prise de Quimper City where King Grallon resided and where the relics were transferred. s to follow them, before Charles of Blois had formed the design for this Charles de Blois Pretender to the Duchy of Brittany who besieged Quimper. siege. The city was taken in 1344; the victors committed great cruelties there, and famine did not fail to follow in the wake of the war in 1346. Then the good religious, who had predicted both, having been unable to avert the effects of the first, made those of the second tolerable for the poor through the care and success he had in effectively persuading the rich that they were, on these occasions, only the dispensers of their own goods. God likewise revealed to him the plague that devastated the city and the reg ion of Quimper in 1349. H peste qui désola la ville Black Death epidemic that struck Quimper and caused the death of Jean. e had knowledge of it from the previous year while he was in the choir with his brethren. The other religious, seeing him weeping bitterly, asked him the subject of such vivid sorrow. He told them nothing other than that the city would soon be afflicted by a new calamity. Indeed, from the following summer, the contagion carried off a great number of people.

Blessed John, in these circumstances, offered his life to God as a sacrifice, and charitably exposed it through the assiduity with which he served those stricken by the plague, to whom he administered the sacraments and spiritual and bodily consolations, with a zeal and affection that were rewarded by a holy death, caused by the same malady that carried off so many others every day. Thus, Blessed John ended, in the exercises of charity, a life he had spent in those of penance and prayer. He died at the age of about sixty-nine, after having worn the habit of Saint Francis for a long time and having constantly observed all its rules down to the smallest iota, as the author of his life expresses; which, in the opinion of a great Pope, takes the place of the most distinguished miracles, and is sufficient to canonize a child of Saint Francis.

The body of this holy religious was interred in the church of his Order's convent in Quimper, and in the chapel that was near the door of the choir, under the rood screen, on the Gospel side. It was later removed from the coffin that had served for his burial and placed in a more honorable reliquary which, for some time, was kept under a small dome in the shape of a chapel, composed of latticework and iron grilles. Finally, it was removed from there as well to be placed in the chapel that formed the right wing of the choir. Although this holy body is lost today, the city of Quimper still has great confidence in the Blessed John, and it is asserted that many sick people have been healed through his intercession. One sees his statue in the cathedral, before which the faithful make vows and offerings. This servant of God is especially invoked to find lost objects. Excerpt from the Saints of Brittany, by Dom Lubineau and Dom Lubineau Hagiographer and historian of Brittany, author of the source. Abbé Tressaux.