TOWARDS THE END OF THE THIRD CENTURY.
HE was succeeded by St. Turibius. His head is shown in the cathedral of Mans, but the most of his relics in the neighboring Benedictin abbey of nuns called St. Julian's du Prè, famous for miracles; though the greatest part of these relics was burnt, or scattered in the wind by the Huguenots, who plundered the shrine of St. Julian, in 1562. He was much honored in France, and many churches built during the Norman succession in England, especially about the reign of Henry II., who was baptized in the church of St. Julian, at Mans, bear his name: one in particular at Norwich, which the people by mistake imagine to have been dedicated under the title of the venerable Juliana, a Benedictin nun at Norwich, who died in the odor of sanctity, but never was publicly invoked as a saint. St. Julian of Mans had an office in the Sarum breviary. See Tillem. t. 4, pp. 448, 729. Gal. Christ. Nov. &c.
ST. MARIUS, ABBOT.
DYNAMIUS, patrician of the Gauls who is mentioned by St. Gregory of Tours, (l. 6, c. 11,) and who was for some time steward of the patrimony of the Roman church in Gaul, in the time of St. Gregory the Great, as appears by a letter of that pope to him, (in which he mentions that he sent him in a reliquary some of the filings of the chains of St. Peter, and of the gridiron of St. Laurence,) was the author of the lives of St. Marius and of St. Maximus of Ries. From the fragments of the former in Bollandus, we learn that he was born at Orleans, became a monk, and after some time was chosen abbot at La-Val-Benois, in the diocese of Sisteron, in the reign of Gondebald, king of Burgundy, who died in 509. St. Marius made a pilgrimage to St. Martin's, at Tours, and another to the tomb of St. Dionysius, near Paris, where, falling sick, he dreamed that he was restored to health by an apparition of St. Dionysius, and awaking, found himself perfectly recovered. St. Marius, according to a custom received in many monasteries before the rule of St. Bennet, in imitation of the retreat of our divine Redeemer, made it a rule to live a recluse in a forest during the forty days of Lent. In one of these retreats, he foresaw, in a vision, the desolation which barbarians would soon after spread in Italy, and the destruction of his own monastery, which he foretold before his death, in 555. The abbey of La-Val-Benois[1] being demolished, the body of the saint was translated to Forcalquier, where it is kept with honor in a famous collegiate church which bears his name, and takes the title of Concathedral with Sisteron. St. Marius is called in French St. May, or St. Mary, in Spain, St. Mere, and St. Maire, and in some places, by mistake, St. Marrus. See fragments of his life compiled by Dynamius, extant in Bollandus, with ten preliminary observations.
Footnotes:
1. In Latin Vallis Bodonensis. Baillet and many others call it at
present Beuvons, or Beuvoux: but there is no such village. Bevons
indeed is the name of a village in Provence, one league from
Sisteron; but the ruins of the abbey La-Val-Benois are very
remarkable, in a village called St. May, in Dauphiné, sixteen
leagues from Sisteron, in which diocese it is. See many mistakes of
martyrologists and geographers concerning this saint and abbey
rectified by Chatelain, p. 424.
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JANUARY XXVIII.
SAINT AGNES, V.M.
A SECOND commemoration of St. Agnes occurs on this day in the ancient Sacramentaries of pope Gelasius and St. Gregory the Great; as also in the true Martyrology of Bede. It was perhaps the day of her burial, or of a translation of her relics, or of some remarkable favor obtained through her intercession soon after her death.