I was introduced to Saint Fabiola by my life-long friend Francoise, French educator and contemporary art lover and expert, who presented me with a gift last fall of badge of Santa Fabiola. Here I am wearing it to a party, where it had the desired effect
of helping me start conversations with complete strangers—something I dread! Fabiola was a fourth century Roman noblewoman and early Christian whose first husband was such a brute that she divorced him. This was allowed in Roman law, but already against the precepts of her religion. Nevertheless, she took another husband and lived with him until he died, whereupon she put on sackcloth and ashes and repented her sin. She gave up her life of luxury and devoted herself to the needs of the poor—erecting a hospital where she nursed the sick herself and donating her fortune to religious communities. In 395, she traveled to the holy land, visited St. Jerome in Bethlehem, and continued her charitable work in Jerusalem. She eventually returned to Rome, where she died in the year 399 on December 27th, which is now her feast day. No less than St. Jerome wrote a eulogy of her.
Fabiola is the patron saint of divorced people, victims of abuse, unfaithfulness, and unhappy marriages.
Modern age interest in her starts with Jean- Jacques Henner (1829–1905), a French painter who painted an Idealized portrait of Saint Fabiola in classical Roman dress in 1885. His painting was lost in 1912, but artists all over the world, following prints of the original, copied the image in many media and played with the characterization of the saint.
In 2009 Francis Alÿs, a Swiss artist who lives in Mexico City, put together a traveling exhibition of his collection of over 300 renderings of Henner’s Saint Fabiola.
My friend Françoise bought my badge at a showing in Switzerland. She gave me a choice of a few versions, and I chose the one that made the saint look like a woman of the Seventies, the era when I was divorced and she became, unbeknownst to me, my patron saint, too.
