ON ST. BENEDICT, BISHOP OF ANGERS AND CONFESSOR.
From the Martyrologies and Breviary.
9th Century.
CommentaryBenedict, Bishop and Confessor of Angers (S.)
J. B. S.
The diligence of the indefatigable collector of the Saints of Gaul escaped the holy Benedict, of whom we here briefly treat, in the Sammarthani the twenty-ninth bishop of Angers in order, concerning whom they found nothing worthy of memory besides the cult received on this day and the diploma or privilege of Louis the Pious of three vessels upon the Loire, Known in few Martyrologies, which is there fully related from the Chartophylax of the church. Castellan received Benedict from the said Sammarthani, or from the Breviary of Angers, as is almost perceived from the collated texts. Thus he has it: At Angers, of St. Benedict the bishop, some of whose relics are extant at St. Maurille: but thus it is read in the Gallia Christiana: The holiness of Benedict is recalled under a double rite on the XV day of July, and some of his relics are extant in the collegiate of blessed Maurille. Among the fuller Usuardine codices there occurs the Bordeaux one alone which makes mention of him, in these words: Of St. Benedict, bishop of Angers.
[2] The Breviary of Angers, edited at Paris in the year 1624, plainly confirms the assertion of the Sammarthani concerning the feast under a double rite on this day; in the Breviary he is venerated with a double rite. where from the common of a Confessor bishop all things are taken except the fourth lesson of the second nocturn, which it exhibits as proper in that manner, that you may understand nothing survives of the Saint's deeds. Hear it: Benedict the bishop presided over the church of Angers, Louis the Pious reigning, whom also for the sake of the church he went to in the third year of his empire, and obtained from him that the privileges which had been granted by his father Charlemagne and the earlier kings to the church of Angers, he would hold ratified, and would will all its goods to be immune and free from the right of the fisc thereafter. The rest which he did in his life have perished by the injury of times or the negligence of men. Alone surviving among posterity remained the memory of his holiness, and the veneration propagated by the public cult of the Church, with the relics of his body, which, laid up in the church of St. Maurille, are celebrated with the highest devotion of citizens and strangers.