ST FIACRE, ANCHORET AND CONFESSOR - 30 AUGUST

 

ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN AUGUST

Saints celebrated on the 30th of August

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 FIACRE, ANCHORET AND CONFESSOR 

Saint Fiacre [Fiaker, Fefre] was nobly born in Ireland, and had his education under the care of a bishop of eminent sanctity. Looking upon all worldly advantages as dross to gain Christ, he left his country and friends, and with certain pious companions sailed over into France, in quest of some close solitude, in which he might devote himself to God, unknown to the rest of the world. 

HE BUILT A LITTLE ORATORY IN THE WILDERNESS

In the diocese of Meaux, St Faro, Bishop, gave him a solitary dwelling in a forest, where the holy anchoret made himself a cell and built a little oratory. The life he led was most austere, and only necessity or charity ever interrupted his exercises of prayer and heavenly contemplation. 

Many resorted to him for advice, and the poor for relief. His tender charity for all moved him to attend cheerfully those who came to consult him; and he built, at some distance from his cell, a kind of hospital for the reception of strangers and pilgrims. 

HE SERVED THE POOR WITH HIS OWN HANDS

There he entertained the poor, serving them with his own hands, and he often miraculously restored to health those who were sick. But he never suffered any woman to enter the enclosure of his hermitage; which was an inviolable rule among the Irish monks.  He died about the year 670, on August 30. His body was buried in his own oratory. 

(Excerpts from Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints) 

[St Fiacre, the saint with the shovel, is patron saint of cab drivers and against haemorrhoids.]