3. Jacopo Tintoretto, San Rocco in gloria, 1564, oil on canvas, 240x360 cm. Scuola Grande - Sala dell'Albergo. Detail.

The opening of the procedure for the Canonisation of Saint Roch (fig. 3) dates back to 1377, the work of Pope Gregorio XI, who was still in Avignon. Indeed, there are no extant documents of the formal Canonisation of Saint Roch. On the 14 July, 1590, the Venetian ambassador in Rome, A. Badoer, wrote to Doge Pasquale Cicogna that Pope Sisto (1585-1590) was going to have him canonised “or taken him away from the number of Saints” perhaps so as not to recognise a “certain” canonisation made by the anti-Pope Giovanni XXIII (1410-1415). However, the sanctity of Saint Roch was certainly recognised “De Consensu Ecclesiae”, the immemorial cult Pope Urbano VIII approved by solemn decree in 1625. According to Diedo as early as 1414 in Konstanz, on the opening of the Council, the Council Fathers invoked the protection of Saint Roch, following an outbreak of the plague, taking his image on a solemn procession and obtaining his protection.

It is thought that the day of his liturgical feast, 16 August, was established in 1440 in Montpellier, where a chapel in the saint’s honour had existed since 1421. The Martirologio Romano of 1678 bears his name for this day’s feast.
As B. Bertoli states, Saint Roch is considered as a liberator from the scourge of plague in the most ancient text we possess: the Congratulamini Mass which dates back to the second half of the Fifteenth century.
The Bollandisti Acta Sanctorum reports from a 1486 breviary that the Saint's Proprium was recited or sung in the Dioceses of Lubecca. The Roman Missal of 1523 refers to the communal part of the Mass Pro iter agentibus, i.e. for those who start on a journey, for the Feast of Saint Roch. The post-tridentine reform proposed by Pio V in 1570 prescribed for Saint Roch the Mass for the communal for the confessor-saints Justus ut palma florebit which was reported in the Venice Proprio and in the following editions of the Roman Missal as an appendix, pro aliquibus locis , until the Second Vatican Council. In the Breviary used in the Venice dioceses until the Vatican Council II, the “communal part for the non-papal confessor-saints” was used, except in the II nocturnal. In the Divine office recited in the Church of Saint Roch in Venice an antiphon, an actual hymn, appeared: “Ave Roche sanctissime...”(“Ave, our saint Roch, born from noble family, you carry the sign of the cross on the left side of your chest. Oh Roch, come from afar you have miraculously cured through healing touch the deadly epidemics. Hail, oh Roch, called by the breath of an angelic voice: you have received from God the power to chase the plague away”). After the Vatican Council, the name of the Saint no longer appears in the missal, not even pro aliquibus locis . In fact, the reform had aimed at reducing the calendar of saints. Saint Roch was not even included in the calendar of the Venetian Patriarchy in 1983. The danger of plague was a memory from distant times. The Patriarch Roncalli alluded to it in a prayer to Saint Roch he composed in 1957, as to a symbol of “public and private calamities”, of “every scourge” and “mainly of sin”. A Mass for the Feast of Saint Roch was authorised in 1983 and is still in use for the church of the Scuola Grande Arch-Confraternity of Saint Roch in Venice.