Saint Maurus

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Saint Maurus
St. Benedict orders Saint Maurus to the rescue of Saint Placidus. Fra Filippo Lippi, ca.1445.
Born
Died	6th century
Feast	January 15
Attributes	crutch; weighing scale; young man in the garb of a monk, holding an abbot's cross and a spade.
Patronage	cripples; invoked against rheumatism, epilepsy, gout
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Saint Maurus ((French) Maur, (Italian) Mauro) was the first disciple of St. Benedict of Nursia. He is mentioned in St. Gregory the Great's biography of the latter as the first oblate; offered to the monastery by his noble Roman parents as a young boy to be brought up in the monastic life. Four stories involving Maurus recounted by Gregory formed a pattern for the ideal formation of a Benedictine monk. The most famous of these involved St. Maurus's rescue of Saint Placidus, a younger boy offered to St. Benedict at the same time as St. Maurus. The incident has been reproduced in many medieval and Renaissance paintings.

[edit] Veneration

A long Life of St. Maurus appeared in the late 9th century, supposedy composed by one of St. Maurus's contemporaries. According to this account, the bishop of Le Mans, in western France, sent a delegation asking Benedict for a group of monks to travel from Benedict's new abbey of Monte Cassino to establish monastic life in France according to the Rule of St. Benedict. The Life recounts the long journey of St. Maurus and his companions from Italy to France, accompanied by many adventures and miracles as St. Maurus is transformed from the obedient disciple of Benedict into a powerful, miracle-working holy man in his own right. According to this account, after the great trek, St. Maurus founded Glanfeuil as the first Benedictine monastery in France. It was located on the south bank of the Loire river, a few miles east of Angers. The nave of its thirteenth-century church and some vineyards remain today (according to tradition, the chenin grape was first cultivated at this monastery.)

Scholars now believe that this Life of Maurus is a forgery by a 9th-century abbot of Glanfeuil, named Odo. It was composed, as were many such saints' lives in Carolingian France, to popularize local saints' cults. The bones of St. Maurus had supposedly been found at Glanfeuil by one of Odo's immediate predecessors. By the mid-9th century, the abbey had become a local pilgrimage site supplementing (or rivalling) the nearby abbeys of Fleury, which claimed to have the bones of St. Benedict himself, and Le Mans, which had supposedly obtained the bones of St. Benedict's sister, St. Scholastica.

Odo and the monks of Glanfeuil had been obliged to flee to Paris in the face of Vikings maurauding along the Loire. There Odo reestablished the cult of St. Maurus at the suburban Parisian abbey of Saint-Pierre-des-Fossés, later renamed Saint-Maur-des-Fossés. The cult of St. Maurus slowly spread to monasteries throughout France and by the 12th century had been adopted by Monte Cassino in Italy, along with a revived cult of St. Placidus. By the late Middle Ages, the cult of St. Maurus, often associated with St. Placidus, had spread to all Benedictine monasteries. He was sometimes identified with the semi-legendary Saint Amaro, who is said to have travelled to the Earthly Paradise.

In the 18th century, the cult of St. Maurus was moved to the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés where it remained a popular center until the relics were dispersed by a Parisian mob during the French Revolution. St. Maurus is still venerated by Benedictine congregations today, many monks adopting his name and dedicating monasteries to his patronage, despite scholars' doubts about his historical existence.

In art, he is depicted as a young man in the garb of a monk, holding an abbot's cross and a spade (an allusion to the monastery of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, literally "Saint Maurus of the Moats").

Another of St. Maurus' attributes is a crutch, in reference to his patronage of cripples. He was invoked against rheumatism, epilepsy, and gout. He is also sometimes shown with a scale, a reference to the scale used to measure food, given to him by Benedict. The monks of Fossés exhibited this implement throughout the Middle Ages.

[edit] Sources

Rosa Giorgi; Stefano Zuffi (ed.), Saints in Art (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2003), 272.
John B. Wickstrom: "Text and Image in the Making of a Holy Man: An Illustrated Life of Saint Maurus of Glanfeuil (MS Vat. Lat. 1202), Studies in Iconography 14(1994), 53-85.

[edit] External links

(English) Maurus at the Catholic Encyclopedia
St. Benedict's Abbey - Benedictine Brothers and Fathers in America's Heartland
The Holy Rule of St. Benedict - Online translation by Rev. Boniface Verheyen, OSB, of St. Benedict's Abbey
Benedictine College - Dynamically Catholic, Benedictine, Liberal Arts, and Residential