Devotion to St. Isidore the Farmer in the United States

Today is the feast of St. Isidore, a peasant farmer on the outskirts of Madrid. He lived from about 1070 to 1130, and Mardid was liberated from Muslim rule when he was a boy. With his saintly wife, Maria Toribia, he had one son. He was known for the miraculous assistance of angels in his field work, which enabled him to attend daily Mass, and for feeding the poor, even from his own meager food.

The National Catholic Rural Life Conference, founded by Archbishop Edwin O’Hara, chose St. Isidore as its patron in its effort to evangelize rural society and promote a back-to-the-land movement. O’Hara named the conference’s initial publication St. Isidore’s Plow in 1922 and would later launch a campaign to promote devotion to St. Isidore throughout the country and also throughout the world. David S. Bovée described this effort in detail in his book The Church and the Land : The National Catholic Rural Life Conference and American Society, 1923-2007:

The Conference attracted the laity by encouraging devotion to the Church’s patron of agriculture, St. Isidore. Although Father O’Hara had used the name of the twelfth-century Spanish day laborer for his first NCRLC organ St. Isidore’s Plow, actual devotion did not begin until Bishop Schlarman composed a prayer to the saint in the 1930s. This was followed by a commissioned painting of the saint and more hagiographical and devotional literature. In 1947, at the Conference’s request, Pope Pius XII declared St. Isidore the patron saint of the NCRLC and granted permission for a more solemn celebration of his feast day (March 22, later May 15) in the United States. In the same year, work began on a shrine to St. Isidore in the NCRLC headquarters building in Des Moines. This Chapel of St. Isidore was finally dedicated on May 7, 1956.

Meanwhile, in 1950, the Company of St. Isidore was founded under the leadership of Bishop O’Hara to foster devotion to the NCRLC’s patron saint. Members of the Company of St. Isidore were granted a number of special indulgences and given a membership card and medal, as well as the quarterly
Harvest of St. Isidore and other prayer books and devotional material. The Conference sold statuettes of St. Isidore and his wife, St. Maria Della Cabeza, as well as a “do-it-yourself ” red cedar wood “outdoor shrine kit” to display them in. The Conference promoted an annual novena to St. Isidore
on his feast day, and by 1956, more than a hundred thousand people participated. By 1959, a Conference official claimed that St. Isidore, who a decade ago was “unknown ….. except to a devout few,” was honored on his feast day “in every church of the country—even in the cities.” Rural Catholics carried their devotion to the saint over to Europe: in 1957, 1958, 1959, and 1962, the NCRLC sponsored pilgrimages to the shrine of St. Isidore in Madrid, and those Conference members who made frequent trips to Europe, such as Ligutti, made it a point to visit the shrine whenever they were there.

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Because of NCRLC, St. Isidore is on the liturgical calendar of the United States and is recognized as the patron saint of farmers worldwide. Here are two prayers from the conference’s Rural Life Prayerbook:

PRAYER IN HONOR OF SAINT ISIDORE

O God, who taught Adam the simple art of tilling the soil, and who through Jesus Christ, the true vine, revealed yourself the husbandman of our souls, deign, we pray, through the merits of blessed Isidore, to instill into our hearts a horror of sin and a love of prayer, so that, working the soil in the sweat of our brow, we may enjoy eternal happiness in heaven, through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.

A PRAYER TO SAINT ISIDORE, PATRON OF COUNTRY PEOPLE

Good Saint, we are told that your devotion to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was so great that you would rise before it was light in order to be able to attend Mass before beginning your work in the fields. Obtain for us, we pray you, some of that loving devotion to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. There it is that the fruits of our farm labor, bread and wine, are brought and offered to God by the priest. Then, in the consecration, Christ Himself, Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, becomes present on our altars under the appearances of this same bread and wine. And in what was the altar bread. He comes to us to be the very food of our souls. If we deeply realize the value and beauty of Holy Mass, we will be very happy to attend as often as we possibly can.

Help us to understand that in the Mass we offer ourselves to God with Christ by the hands of the priest. There we can bring to God all that we do, and offer it to Him in union with His Holy Sacrifice. The oftener we do this now, the happier we shall be hereafter. Good Saint Isidore, bless us and our labors, that we may some day reap the reward of good works with you in heaven. Amen.

Here is my favorite painting of the saint by Joseph von Führich, a member of the St. Luke’s Brotherhood (Nazarene Movement). Isidore represents their idealization of the medieval prayer and the unpretentious approach to nature and art.