The life of St Vitalis the Monk
There he took up a labor that scandalized the city for as long as he lived it: working by day for wages, he spent what he earned each evening visiting, one at a time, the women who worked as prostitutes in Alexandria, offering each the day's earnings so that she might refrain from her usual trade that single night. He stayed in the room with her, but rather than sin he spent the night in prayer and psalmody, keeping silent about it and leaving quietly before dawn. Because he told no one his purpose, the city took his visits at face value and reviled him for them, and he bore that reproach without correcting it or defending himself, asking only that people not pass judgment on others they did not understand. Some of the women he visited did leave the life he had found them in, entering monasteries, marrying, or taking up honest work, credited by those who later told his story to his quiet, costly persistence. Only after his death, when the truth of what he had actually done in those rooms became known, did the city's judgment of him turn to reverence. He reposed in Alexandria, remembered since as a patron of those the world was quickest to condemn.
