FABIOLA. - Her biographer is St. Jerome, in his letter to Oceanus, written precisely on the occasion of F.’s death. Of the most noble family of the Fabii, having married at a very young age a dissolute man, she divorced him in order to contract a new marriage. Upon the death of her second husband, she acknowledged her faults, abandoned her comforts and her splendid garments, and on Holy Saturday presented herself among the penitents in the atrium of the Lateran basilica, in the presence of the pope, the clergy, and all the people. She sold her possessions and jewels in order to devote herself entirely to works of charity.
She founded in Rome the first hospital, herself attending to all the humblest services; she supported monasteries, clothed the poor not only in Rome but also among the Volscians and throughout all the islands of the Tyrrhenian Sea; she competed with Pammachius for the privilege of opening a hospice for pilgrims at Porto. Having gone to Palestine, she benefited from St. Jerome’s teaching in her study of the prophets, the Gospels, and the Psalms (St. Jerome, Ep. 64: PL 22, 608); but, when news arrived of the incursions of the barbarians, she returned to Rome, where she died in 399. St. Jerome closed his letter by repeating St. Paul’s saying: Ubi autem abundavit delictum, superbundavit gratia (Ad Romanos, 5).