Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
St. Felix was born on May 18th in the year 1515 in Cantalice.
This is a town in the province of Riedi, another area that has a long Franciscan history.
Just ten miles away from where he was born, St. Francis wrote the final form of the Franciscan rule at Monte Colombo.
St. Felix's parents were truly exemplary Christians.
They raised their son well.
People started work early in those days.
When he was nine, he went to work for a man in Città du Cale, about half a day's walk from his house.
His job was to attend the flock, and he took advantage of the solitude to pray and do penance.
He ran into other boys who were working as shepherds, and they mocked him for the way that he spent his time, but eventually his virtue won them over.
When the man for whom he worked heard how virtuous Felix was, he decided that he wanted to have him closer to his house, so he had him work in his fields instead.
The boy was very happy about this because it meant that he was able to go to Mass every morning.
In those mornings, he would have had to go out into the fields earlier.
There wouldn't have been time for Mass or time for his prayers after Mass, but he could be seen both in the fields and in church at the same time.
It seems that an angel filled in for him in the fields when he was occupied in church.
So he thought about becoming a hermit.
He'd heard the stories of the fathers of the desert and thought that would be a good thing to do.
But then he decided, no, he should rather be a Capuchin.
A Capuchin, they were the new Franciscan reform that had something of the fathers of the desert in them, had a very intense life of prayer and penance, especially in those early years.
So he wanted to be a religious, but he wanted to really be a religious.
He didn't want to have an easy life about it.
But he kept putting off the moment in which he would actually enter the Capuchins.
And then one day, early in 1843, a couple of young bulls yoked to a cart got away from him.
And while he was trying to stop him, they ran over him.
And miraculously, this only tore his clothes and left his body completely unscathed.
He recognized the miracle and the mercy of God.
He said, I ought to have died, I ought to have gone to hell for refusing my vocation.
But you, Lord, have spared me.
And so then he went and entered the Capuchins.
For his first three years as a friar, he had various assignments.
Then in 1547, he was assigned to the friary of St. Nicholas de Porzis in Rome as a city questor.
And that's where he remained for the rest of his life.
So the job of a questor, so maybe it might not have been quite so obvious.
He was about 30 years old at this time, 32 by the time that he became a questor.
So he was a mature man, though he hadn't been a friar very long.
The job of questor is to beg for the friars, to beg for food and for the friars and for the people that they serve.
And his job in particular, he was specialized in begging for bread in the city.
After 15 years of this, he was assigned to beg for wine and oil instead.
His job of being a questor is a job for a mature friar with a solid spiritual life because it means spending a lot of time outside the friary where there are innumerable distractions and opportunities to sin abound as well.
And as he went from door to door, St. Felix's maxim was, eyes on the ground, rosary in hand, mind in heaven.
And so it was.
He was able to be recollected even as he walked through the busy streets of Rome.
Since a questor had more dealings with the public than most other friars, they were sort of the public face of the friars together with the porters and to some extent the preachers.
But the questor was out in the city every day.
People would run into him all the time.
And so the Capuchins in general would be judged by the way that their questors behaved.
In 1547, when he started, the Capuchins desperately needed some good publicity.
Just five years before, their third general superior, Bernardino Ochino, had fled over the Alps and become a Protestant pastor.
And he did that right up.
The worst part of it was that he did that right after he'd been reelected by the general chapter.
So this was obviously someone who all the friars trusted, who they thought was a good man.
And yet here he was a Protestant.
So the whole Capuchin order was suspect of heresy.
And there were those who talked about simply suppressing it, shutting the whole thing down.
A Capuchin saint walking the streets of Rome was just what they needed.
And St. Felix unwittingly did much to save the Capuchins.
He was just trying to do his job, but his job was to be a saint and that was what the Capuchins needed.
His habitual greeting was Deo gratias, thanks be to God.
And he came to be called friar Deo gratias because of this.
People knew what he said much better than they knew his name, or it seemed a good nickname as well.
Before long, he became one of the closest friends and advisors of St. Philip Neri.
And they both had a heart for the poor.
That's why we have this gospel talking about charity for the poor, the needy, those who were afflicted in any way, whom both of them would try to console as they could, and both likewise would tell them to trust in God's providence, God's providence that takes care not only of our material needs, but above all of our spiritual needs.
And so the two saints, St. Philip Neri and St. Felix would often meet in the streets and engage in wise conversations, or sometimes sort of amusing conversations, because one of the things they would try to do is to convince people that they weren't saints because they didn't really like being venerated.
But sometimes their attempts to, one time St. Felix, this was later in his life when he was begging for wine, he took the bottle of wine that he was carrying and he offered it to St. Philip, who then took a swig in the middle of the street.
They were trying to show, no, we aren't great penitents, we aren't so mortified, but of course they were very mortified for embarrassing themselves in public.
And fortunately for them, the people realized that that was actually a display of sanctity and not of sinfulness.
So St. Felix also became a counselor to cardinals, cardinals would meet him and talk to him.
They found that he had a simple but profound wisdom.
And also Pope Sixtus V, to whom he predicted that he would become Pope, by telling him, if you're going to be Pope, really do the job, really be Pope, otherwise it would be better for you to remain a simple friar.
So he was not a learned man, as I said, he said, I only know six letters, five red and one white.
So the five red letters were the wounds of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the one white letter was the Blessed Virgin, to whom he was immensely devoted.
One day he went to a lawyer's house to beg for bread and he saw a well-stocked bookcase and above it, hanging on the wall, a crucifix.
And right away he said, Sir, whoever does not understand this book, that is the crucifix, does not know what books are, and if he understands this book, he understands all other books.
So he found everything he needed to know in the crucifix, and he put that into practice.
He slept very little and on wooden boards.
He got up very early in the morning to spend hours in church contemplating the mysteries of Christ.
And then after Mass, he would leave the friary and go barefoot through the streets, both in summer and winter, putting the bread in a bag on his shoulder.
Going barefoot and carrying those heavy loads soon gave him deep sores on his feet, which he sewed up with string, not caring too much about the pain.
In his old age, his superiors ordered him to wear sandals.
He only would eat scraps of bread that were left over from the friar's table.
He said that those were better than whole pieces of bread.
And sometimes it got difficult to carry that full sack of bread back, or of wine and oil later on, back to the friary, but he thought of our Lord burdened by the cross.
One day he found the street blocked by a crowd that had come out of a church after listening to a sermon.
People come out of the church, they're talking about what they said, what they heard, they're talking about other things in their lives, how are you doing?
And so there was this crowd, he couldn't get through, he had the bread to carry.
And so he raises his voice and says, make way for the Capuchin's ass.
So heads turned, they look around and they didn't see any animal, and one of them said, where is your ass, Brother Felix?
And he said, right in front of you, I'm the Capuchin's ass.
So that's what he considered himself, a stubborn beast who carries loads through the streets and deserves to be beaten for not serving his master faithfully.
Because while everyone else was convinced that he was a saint, he knew that he wasn't as faithful to God as he could be.
So the crowd was so edified by his humility that they got more benefit from that than from the sermon they'd heard.
One, of course, he had this deep prayer light.
One night around Christmas meditating on the sweet mystery of the nativity of Jesus, Saint Felix insistently prayed to the Blessed Virgin to let him see the child Jesus, just as she'd given birth to him on that holy night.
And Our Lady did content him, appearing to him with Jesus in her arms.
She did not just show the holy child to him, she also placed him in his arms.
And Saint Felix almost died of joy in that moment.
His actual death was some years later, he died around 7 p.m. on May 18, 1587, it was his 74th birthday.
So before his death, the devil made one last attempt at appearing to him as an evil spirit to drive him into despair.
But Saint Felix defeated the temptation by his humble confidence in our Savior.
And when the demon withdrew, he then had a vision of the Blessed Virgin surrounded by angels.
After his death, Saint Felix's feet, which until then had been full of sores, became white and smooth like those of a child.
He was immediately venerated by the people as a saint, not liturgically, but Pope Pius V ordered the process of canonization to begin immediately after his death, instead of waiting the usual decades that they waited before beginning a process.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.