St. Maurus, Abbot, Confessor 584 A.D. January 15      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 that rank, left with him 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 Subiaco. 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 Tertullus, going one day to fetch water, fell into the lake and was carried the distance of a bow-shot 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 by 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 Monte Cassino, he called St. Maurus there 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 several years. In 581, he resigned the abbacy 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 a 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 roll of parchment laid in his tomb was inscribed this epitaph: "Maurus, a monk and deacon, who came into 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. In the ninth century, for fear of the Normans, 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. This abbey des Fosses was founded by Blidegisilus, deacon of the church of Paris in the time of King Clovis II and of Audebert, bishop of Paris. St. Babolen was the first abbot. This monastery was reformed by St. Mayeul, abbot of Cluny, in 988. In 1533, it was secularized by Clement VII at the request of Francis I and the deanery united to the bishopric of Paris, but the church and village have for several ages borne the name of St. Maur. The abbey of Glanfeuil, now called St. Maur-sur-Loire, was subjected to this des Fosses from the reign of Charles the Bald to the year 1096, in which Urban II, at the solicitation of the Count of Anjou, re-established its primitive independence. Our ancestors under the Norman kings had a particular veneration for St. Maurus, and the noble family of Seymour (from the French, "Saint Maur") borrow from him its name, as Camden observes in his "Remains". The church of St. Peter's des Fosses, two leagues from Paris, now called St. Maurus's, was secularized and made a collegiate in 1533, and the canons removed to St. Louis, formerly called St. Thomas of Canterbury's, at the Louvre in Paris, in 1750. The same year, the relics of St. Maurus were translated from there to the abbey of St. Germain-des-Prez where they are preserved in a rich shrine. An arm of this saint was with great devotion translated to Monte Cassino in the eleventh century, and by its touch a demoniac was afterwards delivered, as is related by Desiderius, at that time abbot of Monte Cassino, who was afterwards pope under the name of Victor III. from Lives of the Saints by Rev. Alban Butler, 1895

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