Nicholas was born in 1245 at Sant'Angelo in Pontano, a small town near Fermo in the March of Ancona, then part of the Papal States. His parents, Compagnonus de Guarutti and Amata de Guidiani, were devout but long childless; tradition relates that they made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Nicholas of Myra at Bari and begged for a son. Their prayer was heard, and the child was given the name of the saint who had obtained him. From this beginning Nicholas learned that his very life was a gift asked of God, and he spent it giving it back.
The boy was studious, kind and gentle. It is said that already at the age of seven, in imitation of his patron, he began to fast several days each week. Still young, he heard the preaching of an Augustinian friar, and the word struck fire in him. At about sixteen he entered the novitiate of the Order of Hermits of Saint Augustine, and was formed under Blessed Angelus de Scarpetti. He studied at the provincial house of studies of the Marche at Ancona from about 1262, and lived in the priories of Recanati, Macerata and others. In 1270, at the age of twenty-five, he was ordained a priest at Cingoli by the Bishop of Osimo.
His brethren found in him a perfect religious: fasting and severe mortification joined to a humility and charity that disarmed everyone. He was not ashamed to beg for his community. He visited the sick and the poor with great tenderness, and his superiors, seeing his gentleness, entrusted him with the daily feeding of the poor at the monastery gate — a charge he carried out so lavishly that the procurator once begged the superior to restrain his generosity.
Around 1274 Nicholas came to Tolentino, and he never left it again. Tradition says he had heard voices of angels repeating "to Tolentino," and he took it as God's command. There he spent the last thirty years of his life preaching, catechizing, and hearing confessions. He worked against the decay of morals that came with the growth of the towns in the late thirteenth century, and made himself a peacemaker in a city torn apart by the feud of Guelphs and Ghibellines, partisans of Pope and Emperor. He was above all a pastor: he sought out the poor, went into the prisons, sat with the dying, and gave his time to sinners no one else would receive.
God set His seal on this hidden life with wonders. Weakened by long fasting and gravely ill, Nicholas received a vision of Jesus, the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint Augustine; Our Lady bade him eat a piece of bread marked with a cross and dipped in water, and he rose up strong. From then on he blessed such small loaves and gave them to the sick, praying to Mary as he did so, and many were cured — the origin of the Augustinian custom of blessing and distributing "Saint Nicholas Bread," kept for centuries in Augustinian churches, in Ireland especially in County Waterford, and in the Philippines in the Kapampangan pan de San Nicolás. Whenever he healed or worked a wonder he would say to the one helped, "Say nothing of this," explaining that he was only God's instrument.
He also received visions of the world beyond: images of Purgatory, which his friends attributed to his long fasts, and which set the deepest mark on his spirituality. Prayer and sacrifice for the holy souls became the great work of his heart, and for this Pope Leo XIII in 1884 proclaimed him patron of the souls in Purgatory. Toward the end of his life, tradition adds, he heard each evening the singing of the angels.
His last years were a long and painful illness, and he continued through it the mortifications that had shaped his whole life. He died at Tolentino on 10 September 1305. The people at once began to petition for his canonization, and the first Lives were written soon after his death by three learned friars of his own Order — Peter de Monte Rubiano of the March of Ancona, Henry of Urimarla, and Jordan of Saxony. Pope Eugene IV, himself an Augustinian, canonized him on 5 June 1446; Nicholas was the first friar of the Order of Saint Augustine to be raised to the altars, and at his canonization some three hundred miracles were credited to him, including three raisings of the dead.
His relics are venerated at the Shrine of Saint Nicholas in the Basilica of San Nicola in Tolentino, in the province of Macerata; his body, with the severed arms, was rediscovered there in 1926. He is portrayed in the black Augustinian habit, a star on his breast or above his head, holding a lily or a crucifix wreathed with lilies, sometimes a vessel of bread or of money. Churches without number bear his name — in Venice and Rome, in the Bronx, in Bristol, in Barranquilla, and across the Philippines, where he is patron of towns from Banton in Romblon and Macabebe in Pampanga to Cebu City, Sinait, Cabanatuan, Mariveles and four towns of Iloilo. His feast is kept on 10 September, and Augustinian churches hold weekly devotions to him for the suffering souls, with All Souls' Day, 2 November, holding a special place among his clients.
May Saint Nicholas of Tolentino obtain for us his tender care for the poor, the imprisoned and above all the holy souls in Purgatory; imitate today his hidden charity by doing one good work no one will ever know of, and by praying for the dead.
