Saint Benedict Joseph Labre (French: Benot Joseph Labre) (March 25, 1748April 17, 1783) was a French mendicant and Roman Catholic saint. He was born in Amettes, near Arras in the north of France, the eldest of fifteen children of a prosperous shopkeeper, and was religious from a very early age. He was noted for performing public acts of penance for his sins, even minor sins. At the age of sixteen, he attempted to join the Trappists, Carthusians, and Cistercians, but each order rejected him as unsuitable for communal life. The superiors of these orders suspected mental illness that would make Labre unable to fulfill the vow of obedience necessary for any cloistered religious. His confessor, Marconi, wrote Benedict's biography and attributed 136 separate cures to his intercession within three months of his death. Those miracles were instrumental in the conversion of the Reverend John Thayer, the first American Protestant clergyman to convert to Catholicism, who was resident in Rome at the time of St. Benedict's death.[2] A cult grew up around him very soon after his death, and he was declared Blessed by Blessed Pius IX in 1860, and later canonized by Pope Leo XIII in 1881. His feast day in the Roman Catholic Church is April 16.