Henry of Treviso (in what is now northern Italy) was an illiterate day laborer. His family could not afford any sort of education for him and he never attained one. He was a hard worker and a kind person. He saw good in people and simply found no reason to return unkindness in kind.

What seems unique about Henry, among so many others elevated to saintly status, is that he approached his own faith with what seems, in modern terms, to be a truly healthy perspective! Butler writes:

[Henry] frequented the sacraments with extraordinary devotion [uh-oh, sounds like all those others!], and went every day to confession [not one of those types, surely!]; not out of scrupulosity [!!!], either magnifying small imperfections into great sins, or apprehending sin by a disordered imagination where a sound judgment discovers no shadow of evil, but out of a great desire of preserving the utmost purity of conscience . . . .

Remarkably, Henry is lauded for not doing what so many of the other saints seemed to fetishize–he did not go about decrying himself as the worst among all sinners, he did not take this or that bad habit of his and make an equivalence of it to hammering the nails into Christ’s body, he did not even regard himself as a bad person, either from a lack of education or of a lack of human decency. For him, attending to worship and to God were for the purpose of keeping his own moral compass in good working order, for ensuring his continued connection to what he valued, for living out the humble conviction that he did not always have all the answers–and that this is OK!

Further, Henry felt no need to hoard…or, if he felt the need, he resisted it. He lived on what he made, and, on a daily basis, whatever he had beyond what he needed, he shared with those who had less. Even when he was too old and feeble to work, and he had to rely upon the people around him for support with their alms, Henry would only use whatever part of the daily alms was necessary for his subsistence and give away the rest to those without, never setting aside anything for the morrow. He did not save up for his own “rainy day” because he could see when someone else’s rainy day had already arrived and shared with that person then and there.

Henry feels so much more genuine than many of those saints whose lives either showed great and godly promise from the cradle or those with the greatest of riches who eschewed them for poverty. He was not among the saints who underwent unbearable tortures or who built a lasting legacy of monasteries or convents. He was not a priest or a pope or part of any religious order. He was…Henry.