> Rock or Roch, healer (1378): Saint par excellence to be invoked against
> pestilence.
[snip]
If anyone else on the list has any thoughts I would love to hear it.
I always thought St Roch was patron saint of dogs. I am sure that in a BBC
programme about dogs a few years ago there was a sequence showing the town
in Italy where St Roch is primarily venerated where dogs are given a good
time at the festival. There was even a prayer of St Roche in which a dog
asks his master to deal justly with him - sensible things, not the
sentimental trash usually associated with a "doggie's prayer".
While I was in New York last summer I saw a statue of St Roch in the
Cloisters Museum which shows him exhibiting the bubo in his groin and
attended by a dog who is leaping up at him holding a flat loaf in its mouth.
I understood that St Roch was invoked against the plague because he himself
had suffered it and recovered, and that his recovery was due in no small
measure to the activities of his dog who brought food for his master
(scavenged presumably from the unsupervised kitchens of other plague
victims) when he was too weak to help himself, and licked his master's
buboes so that the swellings burst outwards and not inwards.
As one who shares her home with a furry friend, St Roch stands well to the
front of our personal pantheon...
Brenda M. Cook.
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