ST COLMAN OF IRELAND, MARTYR- 13 OCTOBER

 

ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN OCTOBER

Saints celebrated on the 13th 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 COLMAN OF IRELAND, MARTYR

In the beginning of the eleventh century, the neighbouring nations of Austria, Moravia, and Bohemia were engaged against each other in implacable dissensions and wars. 

Colman, a Scot or Irishman, and according to Cuspinian and other Austrian historians, of blood royal, going on a penitential pilgrimage to Jerusalem, arrived by the Danube from the enemy’s country at Stockerau, a town six miles above Vienna. 

The inhabitants persuading themselves that he was a spy, unjustly tortured him various ways, and at length hanged him on a gibbet, on October 13, 1012. 

The double testimony of heroic actions of virtue and of miracles is required before any one is enrolled by the church among the saints, as Gregory IX. declares in his bull of the canonisation of St Antony of Padua. Neither miracles suffice, without clear proof of heroic sanctity, nor the latter without the former, says that pope; and the same is proved by the late Benedict XIV. 

A fervent spirit of compunction and charity, and invincible meekness and patience under exquisite torments and unjust sufferings were an undoubted proof of the sanctity of the servant of God, which was confirmed by the incorruption of his body, and innumerable miracles. 

Three years after his death his body was translated by the Bishop of Megingard, at the request of Henry, marquis of Austria, and deposited at Mark, the capital of the ancient Marcomans, near Moravia. 

St Colman is honoured in Austria among the tutelar saints of that country, and many churches in that part of Germany bear his name. 

(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints - 🎨 King Henry, St Colman's martyrdom in the background)