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Saint Drogo of Sebourg 

patron saint of coffee

(March 14, 1105– April 16, 1186), is a Flemish saint. He was born in Epinoy, Flanders and died in Sebourg, France. His feast day is on April 16

Drago was a child of Flemish nobility. His mother died when he was born. He learned the reason for her death, and it made an emotional impact on him. He held himself responsible. Later in his life, he went to extreme penances, perhaps to relieve his guilt. Drogo was orphaned when he was a teenager.

At age eighteen, he rid himself of all his property and became a penitential pilgrim. As a pilgrim, he traveled to Rome about nine or ten times. He became a shepherd for about six years, working in Sebourg, near Valenciennes, where he worked for a woman named Elizabeth de l'Haire.

Reportedly, Drogo was able to bilocate, to maintain his actual presence in two totally different places at the same time. Witnesses claimed seeing Drogo working in fields simultaneously, and going to Mass every Sunday.

During a pilgrimage, he was stricken with an unsightly bodily affliction. He became so terribly deformed that he frightened the townspeople. In his twenties, a cell was built for him to protect the local citizens of the village from his appearance. Since he was so holy, his cell was built attached to his church. St. Drogo stayed in his cell without any human contact, except for a small window in which he received the Holy Eucharist and obtained his food. He stayed there for the rest of his life, about forty more years, surviving only on barley, water, and the Holy Eucharist.

Saint Drogo became an anchorite. 

An anchorite or anchoret (female: anchoress) is someone who, for religious reasons, withdraws from secular society so as to be able to lead an intensely prayer-oriented, ascetic, or Eucharist-focused life. While anchorites are frequently considered to be a type of religious hermit, unlike hermits they were required to take a vow of stability of place, opting for permanent enclosure in cells often attached to churches. Also unlike hermits, anchorites were subject to a religious rite of consecration that closely resembled the funeral rite, following which they would be considered dead to the world, a type of living saint. Anchorites had a certain autonomy, as they did not answer to any ecclesiastical authority other than the bishop.