ST BAIN, BISHOP OF THEROUANNE - 20 JUNE

 

ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN JUNE

Saints celebrated on the 20th of June

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SAINT BAIN, BISHOP OF THEROUANNE 

(Now St Omer, and Abbot of St Vandrille’s.) Saint Bain [Bagne] was fifth bishop of that see, to which he was promoted before the middle of the seventh century. 

Merville, where St Mauront had built his monastery of Breuil, being in the diocese of Terouanne, St Bain translated thence the body of St Amatus, to the church which St Maurout had lately built at Douay. When SS. Luglius and Luglianus, two Irish hermits, had been murdered by highwaymen in his diocese, Bain buried them with great honour in the chapel of his castle at Lilleres, where they are honoured as patrons of the town on October 23. 

SOLITUDE

Solitude, “which nourishes prayer as a mother does her child,” as St John Damascene says, being always the ruling inclination of our saint, he resigned his bishopric, and retiring to the abbey of Fontenelle or St Vandrille’s, in Normandy, put on the monastic habit, as he was already possessed perfectly of the spirit, and some time after was chosen the fifth abbot of that house of St Vandrille, in 701. 

Out of his great devotion to the relics of the saints, he translated the bodies of St Vandrille, Ansbert, and Wolfgran or Wulfran, out of the chapel of St Paul, built by St Vandrille for the burial-place, into the great church of St Peter, in which the monks celebrated the divine mysteries. Pepin, duke of the French, having founded or considerably augmented the abbey of Fleury, now called St Benedict’s on the Loire, situated nine leagues above Orleans, he committed the same to the direction of St Bain, in 706. 

The saint died about the year 711, and is honoured on June 20 at St Vandrille’s, and in the Gallican Martyrologies. 

From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints