ST ELEUTHERIUS, BISHOP OF TOURNAI, MARTYR - 20 FEBRUARY

 

ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN FEBRUARY

 Saints celebrated on the 20th of February

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 ELEUTHERIUS, BISHOP OF TOURNAI, MARTYR 

(A.D. 532.) Saint Eleutherius was born at Tournai, of Christian parents, whose family had been converted to Christ by St Piat, one hundred and fifty years before. The faith had declined at Tournai ever since St Piat’s martyrdom, by reason of its commerce with the heathen islands of Taxandria, now Zeland, and by means of the heathen French kings, who resided some time at Tournai.

HE CONVERTED THE GREATER PART OF THE FRANKS IN THAT COUNTRY TO FAITH

Eleutherius was chosen bishop of that city, in 486; ten years after which King Clovis was baptised at Rheims. Eleutherius converted the greater part of the Franks in that country to the faith, and opposed most zealously certain heretics who denied the mystery of the Incarnation, by whom he was wounded on the head with a sword, and died of the wound five weeks after, on July 1, in 532. 

HIS RELICS

The most ancient monuments, relating to this saint, seem to have perished in a great fire which consumed his church, and many other buildings, at Tournai, in 1092, with his relics. 

HIS VITA

St Eleutherius' Vita: The author wrote before the invasion of the Normans, and the translation of the saint’s relics: but long after the saint’s death, and by making him be born in the reign of Diocletian, yet contemporary with St Medard, destroys his own credit. Some years after, another author much enlarged this life, and inserted a history of the translation of the relics of this saint made in 897. A third writer added a relation of later miracles, and of the translation of these relics into the city of Tournai, in 1164. All these authors deserve little notice, except in relating facts of their own time.

(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints - 🎨 St Eleutherius of Tournai Baptising Converts, Flemish, early 16th century)