ST AUREA OF PARIS, VIRGIN AND ABBESS - 4 OCTOBER

 

ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN OCTOBER

Saints celebrated on the 4th 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 AUREA OF PARIS, VIRGIN AND ABBESS 

[Also October 5]. When St Eligius, by the liberality of King Dagobert, settled at Paris a nunnery of three hundred virgins, he appointed Aurea abbess of that numerous family. 

She walked before them in the exercises of religious perfection, and, in the thirty-fourth year of her abbatial dignity, being invited to glory by St Eligius in a vision after his death, she exhorted her sisters to rejoice at the near prospect of their bliss, and died on October 4, 666. With her one hundred and sixty of her nuns were swept off by the pestilence. 

Her nunnery was called St Eligius’s and StAurea’s. As it stood within the city she could not be buried at it, and St Eligius had built the church of St Paul, then without the city, for a cemetery for her community. 

She was therefore interred at St Paul’s, and some time after, her bones were taken up, and kept in a rich shrine in that church, till they were translated into her monastery. This nunnery being fallen to decay, it was united to the episcopal see of Paris in the twelfth century, and the bishop placed in it Benedictine monks. 

Four hundred years after, the first archbishop, John Francis de Gondi, settled in that church the Regular Clerks called Barnobites, in 1636. 

Her relics have been in some former ages in equal veneration at Paris with those of St Genevieve. 

(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints)