ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN MARCH
Saints celebrated on the 12th of March
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 PAUL OF LEON, BISHOP AND CONFESSOR
Saint Paul of Leon was a noble Briton, a native of Cornwall, cousin of St Samson, and his fellow-disciple under St Iltutus [St Illtyd].
We need no other proof of his wonderful fervour and progress in virtue, and all the exercises of a monastic life, than the testimony of St Iltutus, by whose advice St Paul left the monastery to embrace a more perfect eremitical life in a retired place in the same country.
HE CONTINUED THE SAME AUSTERE EREMITICAL LIFE
Some time after, our saint sailing from Cornwall, passed into Armorica, and continued the same austere eremitical life in a small island on the coast of the Osismians, a barbarous idolatrous people in Armorica, or Little Britain.
Prayer and contemplation were his whole employment, and bread and water his only food, except on great festivals, on which he took with his bread a few little fish.
HE PASSED OVER TO THE CONTINENT AND INSTRUCTED THEM IN THE FAITH
The saint, commiserating the blindness of the pagan inhabitants on the coast, passed over to the continent, and instructed them in the faith.
Withur, count or governor of Bas, and all that coast, seconded by king Childebert, procured his ordination to the episcopal dignity, notwithstanding his tears to prevent it.
THE MONASTERY
Count Withur, who resided in the Isle of Bas, bestowed his own house on the saint to be converted into a monastery; and St Paul placed in it certain fervent monks, who had accompanied him from Wales and Cornwall.
He was himself entirely taken up in his pastoral functions, and his diligence in acquitting himself of every branch of his obligations was equal to his apprehension of their weight.
HE RETIRED INTO THE ISLE OF BAS
When he had completed the conversion of that country, he resigned his bishopric to a disciple, and retired into the isle of Bas, where he died in holy solitude, on March 12, about the year 573, near one hundred years old.
During the inroads of the Normans, his relics were removed to the abbey of Fleury, or St Benedict's on the Loire, but were lost when the Calvinists plundered that church.
THE ANCIENT CITY OF THE OSISMIANS
Leon, the ancient city of the Osismians, in which he fixed his see, takes his name. His festival occurs in the ancient Breviary of Leon, on October 10, perhaps the day of the translation of his relics. For in the ancient Breviary of Nantes, and most others, he is honoured on March 12.
NOTE:
St Paul was ordained priest before he left Great Britain, about the year 530. The little island on the coast of Armorica, where he chose his first abode in France, was called Medonia, and seems to be the present Molene, situated between the Isle of Ushant and the coast. The first oratory which he built on the Continent, very near this island, seems to be the church called from him Lan-Pol.
(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints)
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