ST ANSTRUDIS OF LAON, VIRGIN AND ABBESS AT LAON - 17 OCTOBER

 

ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN OCTOBER

Saints celebrated on the 17th of October

 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 ANSTRUDIS, VIRGIN AND ABBESS AT LAON

Saint Anstrudis (Anstru) was the was daughter of the virtuous and noble couple, Blandin-Boson and St Salaberna, who founded the abbey of St John Baptist at Laon, in which St Salaberna, with the consent of her husband, took the religious veil, was chosen abbess, and is honoured among the saints on September 22. 

Anstrudis faithfully walked in her steps, and after her death, though with the utmost repugnance, succeeded her in the abbacy. 

By a scrupulous observance of monastic discipline in the least points, a tender and affectionate care in conducting her sisters in the paths of Christian perfection, a most profuse charity to the poor, and her constant application to prayer, she was a true model of sanctity. 

No exterior employments interrupted the union of her heart with God, or her sweet attention to his holy presence. Except on Sundays and on Christmas day she never took any nourishment but at one moderate refection she made in a day at three o’clock in the afternoon, and on fast-days after sunset. 

Her watchings in devout prayer often kept her the whole night in the church, except that she took a little rest in an uneasy seat before the church door; then returned again to her devotions before the altar. 

Her sanctity was to be approved and made perfect by the trial of afflictions, in which true virtue is always purified and improved, but that which is weak or counterfeit betrays itself, as a building which wants a firm foundation, or a great tree which has not shot its roots deep into the earth is easily blown down by storms. 

The saint’s pious brother Baldwin was treacherously assassinated, and she herself terrified with outrageous threats by Ebroin. That tyrant, however, was at length softened by her intrepid constancy, and approved virtue and innocence, and of a persecutor became her patron and friend. Pepin, when Mayor of the palace, declared himself her strenuous protector. 

She died in 688, and is honoured in Gallican and Benedictine Calendars. The rich Benedictine nunnery of St John Baptist at Laon was given to monks of the same Order in 1229, and still flourishes. There is in the same town another great Benedictine abbey of St Vincent, and a third of the Order of Premontré called St Martin’s. 

(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints)