Saints celebrated on the 20th of July
Prayer to the Angels and the Saints
Heavenly Father, in praising Your Angels and Saints we praise Your glory, for by honouring them we honour You, their Creator. Their splendour shows us Your greatness, which infinitely surpasses that of all creation.
In Your loving providence, You saw fit to send Your Angels to watch over us. Grant that we may always be under their protection and one day enjoy their company in heaven.
Heavenly Father, You are glorified in Your Saints, for their glory is the crowning of Your gifts. You provide an example for us by their lives on earth, You give us their friendship by our communion with them, You grant us strength and protection through their prayer for the Church, and You spur us on to victory over evil and the prize of eternal glory by this great company of witnesses.
Grant that we who aspire to take part in their joy may be filled with the Spirit that blessed their lives, so that, after sharing their faith on earth, we may also experience their peace in heaven. Amen.
ST ULMAR, ABBOT
[Abbot of Samer, three miles from Boulogne.] Saint Ulmar [Wulmar] was nobly born at Sylviaco in the territory of Boulogne in Picardy.
Renouncing the world in his youth, he entered himself a brother in the abbey of Hautmont in Haynault, where it was his employment to keep the cattle, and to hew the wood for the community.
AN EMINENT SPIRIT OF PRAYER
He was distinguished for his eminent spirit of prayer, and being compelled by obedience to receive holy orders, was promoted to the priesthood.
He after this obtained leave to live alone in a hermitage near mount Cassel, and afterwards in 688 founded in a wood upon his father’s estate of Sylviaco in the Boulognois, the abbey of Samer, corruptly so called for St Ulmar’s, at present of the Congregation of St Maur.
HE FOUNDED A NUNNERY
St Ulmar founded a nunnery at Vileria, now Wiere aux Bois, a mile from his own monastery, in which he placed his niece Bertana abbess.
Ceadwalla, king of the West-Saxons, passing that way in his journey to Rome to receive baptism, conferred on St Ulmar a notable largess towards carrying on his foundation.
HEAVENLY CONTEMPLATION
In close retirement in his hermitage near mount Cassel, the saint preserved himself always free from worldly passions by flying from the occasions which chiefly excite them, and by withdrawing from the great scene of earthly business, envy, avarice, and strife.
Here shutting out the busy swarm of vain images which beset us in the world, he inured his mind to happy recollection and heavenly contemplation.
In this sweet repose he daily advanced in fervour and divine charity till he was called to the joys of his Lord on July 20, 710.
HIS RELICS
He was glorified by miracles, and is named in the Roman and other Martyrologies on July 20. On June 17 his relics were conveyed to Boulogne for fear of the plunder of the Normans; and from thence to the abbey of St Peter’s at Ghent, where they were burnt by the fury of the Calvinists in the sixteenth century.
(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints)
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