St. Maurus, Abbot
St. Maurus, Abbot
January 15
510 A.D.
Among the several noblemen who placed their sons under the care of St. Benedict, to be brought up in piety and learning, Equitius, one of the rank, left him with his son Maurus, then but twelve years old, in 522.
The youth surpassed all his fellow monks in the discharge of monastic duties, and when he was grown up St. Benedict made him his coadjutor in the government of Sublaco. Maurus, by his singleness of heart and profound humility, was a model of perfection to all the brethren, and was favored by God with the gift of miracles. St. Placidus, a fellow monk, the son of the senator of Tertullus, going one day to fetch water fell into the lake, and was carried the distance of a bow-shot (approx. 197 ft) from the bank. St. Benedict saw this in spirit in his cell, and bid Maurus run and draw him out. Maurus obeyed; walked upon the waters without perceiving it, and dragged out Placidus byy the hair, without sinking in the least himself. He attributed the miracle to the prayers of St. Benedict, but the holy abbot to the obedience of the disciple. Soon after that holy patriarch had retired to Cassino, he called St. Maurus thither, in the year 528.
St. Maurus, coming to France in 543, founded, by the liberality of King Theodebert, the great abbey of Glanfeuil, now called St.Maur-sur-Loire, which he governed for several years. In 581 he resigned the abbey to Bertulf, and passed the remainder of his life in close solitude, in the uninterrupted contemplation of heavenly things, in order to prepare himself for his passage to eternity. After two years thus employed he fell sick of a fever, with pain in his side; he received the sacraments of the church, lying on sackcloth before the altar of St. Martin, and in the same posture expired on the 15th of January, in the year 584.
He was buried on the right side of the altar in the same church, and on a role of parchment laid in his tomb was inscribed this epitaph;
“Maurus, a monk and deacon, who came to France in the days of King Theodebert, and died the eighteenth day before the month of February.”
St. Maurus is named in the ancient French litany composed by Alcuin, and in the Martyrologies of Florus, Usuard, and others. For fear of the Normans, the ninth century, his body was translated to several places; lastly, in 868, to St. Peter’s des Fosses, then a Benedictine abbey, near Paris, where it was received with great solemnity by AEneas, Bishop of Paris. A history of this translation, written by Eudo, at that time Abbot of St. Peter’s des Fosses, is still extant.
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