He was born in Rome, and wishing to give up, for the sake of Our Lord, all honor and prestige, left home on his wedding day, and set sail for Syria. He lived at Edessa, in Syria, for seventeen years. He prayed for hours and hours in church, and worked as a lowly servant in hospitals. He returned to Rome as a beggar, and died unrecognized in his noble father’s rich palace where he worked as a slave, and where he slept in a small room under the stairs. His parents came to know who it was they had been sheltering from a manuscript found after his death on his body, and written in his own hand. All the bells in Rome started ringing at the moment of the death of Saint Alexis, as a tribute to this selfless beggar, known as “the man of God.” There is a Religious Order in the Catholic Church. founded in the fifteenth century, named for him and called “the Alexian Brothers.” They devote themselves to taking care of the old, the insane and those suffering from nervous collapse.
