ON ST. LAUDULF, BISHOP AND CONFESSOR,
AT ÉVREUX IN GAUL.
About the year 620.
CommentaryLaudulf, bishop and confessor, at Évreux in Gaul (St.)
P. B.
Of St. Laudulf, or Landulf, in French saint Loul, bishop of Évreux, we treated at the eleventh day of this month, The antiquity of the cult. where we treated of St. Taurinus, likewise bishop of Évreux, in the History of his first invention, made in the seventh century by St. Landulf, who was twice admonished by a divine revelation, and described by an anonymous writer there published in the ninth century. But it may be useful here to return to him for a while, as to a witness of Laudulf's sanctity and cult, and now indeed the most ancient one: for the author of the little book on the Life of St. Laudulf, whom he there at number 1 cites as older, has long since perished; as thou wilt presently understand. Further, that today's light has been consecrated to his veneration from immemorial time is sufficiently indicated by Greven, who at this day, in the Usuard enlarged by him and published in the year 1515, announces the memory of St. Landulf. On the same day the Breviary of Évreux which we have, printed at Paris in the year 1586, prescribes his feast and Office with nine Lessons to be celebrated with a double rite. Saussay followed in his Gallican Martyrology, weaving for him on this day a long eulogy.
[2] If thou seekest Acts, there survive none more ancient than those which we gave in the History of the first invention of St. Taurinus just praised; The Acts with which, if it please thee to compare the first six Lessons of the Breviary already indicated, behold them here: "I. Of Landulf, bishop of Évreux, antiquity has left nothing written; save that from the history of the finding of the body of blessed Taurinus some time after his death he appears to have lived under the rule and monarchy of the Clovises in Gaul. II. For it is said that in the time of Lothair, when the Canons of Évreux came daily from the neighboring fields into the city to perform the divine Offices, he too from a village near the city, which even now retains the name of St. Landulf, went with the others to the matutinal rites, and heard on the way choirs of angels chanting and saying: 'The festival of the most blessed Taurinus is to be praised today, whose tongue shines in the church': III. And that he announced this to Viator his bishop: after whose death, being promoted to the bishopric by the votes of all, day and night he besought the Lord to show him the treasure of the relics of St. Taurinus. Nay more, after the circuit of a year, on the same day he returned to the same place where he had heard the song of the angels, with one companion only, and again prostrate in prayer he merited to hear those heavenly voices: but he was anxious and ignorant in what place that treasure lay hid.
[3] from the Breviary of Évreux. "IV. Therefore he prayed God the more earnestly that he would make this manifest to him. At length, lifting up his eyes, he sees a column reaching from earth to heaven, bright as the sun. Digging in which place, having taken a hoe, he found written: 'Here rests blessed Taurinus, first bishop of the city of Évreux.' V. And the place is met with on the road for those coming from the village of St. Landulf to the episcopal church of the city of Évreux, in which is now to be seen a most ample monastery and the underground tomb of St. Taurinus. Then indeed Landulf set a wooden church over the tomb. VI. But since at the finding of those relics very many and very great miracles were daily wrought, it is narrated in that history that a little afterward a book was composed on the Life of St. Landulf, which has perished, and in which many things were written concerning the finding of those relics and the miracles, and concerning the sanctity, good works, and merits of the same Bl. Landulf." We wonder that nothing is here noted about the body of St. Landulf, since Castellan in the universal Martyrology at this day expressly asserts that it is in the church of St. Taurinus.