ST MARIUS, ABBOT - 27 JANUARY

ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN JANUARY

Saints celebrated on the 27th of January

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 MARIUS, ABBOT 

[St Marius of Bodon.] Dynamius, patrician of the Gauls, who is mentioned by St Gregory of Tours, and who was for some time steward of the patrimony of the Roman church in Gaul, in the time of St Gregory the Great, as appears by a letter of that pope to him, (in which he mentions that he sent him in a reliquary some of the filings of the chains of St Peter, and of the gridiron of St Laurence,) was author of the lives of St Marius and of St Maximus of Ries. 

HE WAS BORN AT ORLEANS

From the fragments of the former in Bollandus, we learn that he was born at Orleans, became a monk, and after some time was chosen abbot at La-Val-Benois, in the diocese of Sisteron, in the reign of Gondebald, king of Burgundy, who died in 509. 

HE WAS RESTORED TO HEALTH

St Marius made a pilgrimage to St Martin's, at Tours, and another to the tomb of St Dionysius, near Paris, where, falling sick, he dreamed that he was restored to health by an apparition of St Dionysius, and awakening, found himself perfectly recovered. 

THE RETREATS DURING LENT

St Marius, according to a custom received in many monasteries before the rule of St Benedict, in imitation of the retreat of our divine Redeemer, made it a rule to live a recluse in a forest during the forty days of Lent. 

HIS VISION

In one of these retreats, he foresaw, in a vision, the desolation which barbarians would soon after spread in Italy, and the destruction of his own monastery, which he foretold before his death, in 555. 

HIS RELICS WERE TRANSLATED TO FORCALQUIER

The abbey of La-Val-Benois being demolished, the body of the saint was translated to Forcalquier, where it is kept with honour in a famous collegiate church which bears his name, and takes the title of Concathedral with Sisteron. St Marius is called in French St May or St Mary, in Spain St Mere, and St Maire, and in some places, by mistake, St Maurus. 

(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints)