Abdas, a bishop in Persia, with highly intemperate zeal, set fire to a heathen temple and consumed it to the ground. This injudicious act aroused a persecution against the Christians, the King Isdegerdes being greatly incensed against the bishop. Abdas suffered, and is commemorated by the Greeks on the same day, or on May 16th. Benjamin, his deacon, suffered inhuman tortures, some of indescribable horror. Sharp splinters of reed were driven up the quick of his nails in hands and feet, and he was impaled upon a knotted stick.
S. RENOVATUS, B. OF MERIDA.
(ABOUT A.D. 633.)
[Spanish Martyrologist and modern Roman Martyrology. Authority:—His life by Paul, deacon of Merida, who seems to have lived about the middle of the 7th cent., certainly not long after the death of S. Renovatus.]
S. Renovatus is chiefly memorable for his treatment of a gluttonous monk in his monastery at Cauliana, of which he was abbot. Indeed this is the only incident of his life recorded, and it is given at considerable length. Renovatus was much troubled in his abbey by the conduct of one of his monks, whose love of eating and drinking was a governing passion. The fellow would steal what he was not given, and he became a scandal to the community. Renovatus exhorted him, and reproached him, in vain. Then he ordered him to be whipped; but the whipping proved as inefficacious as the admonitions. The abbot then gave him leave to depart if he liked, or, if he stayed in the monastery, to take anything he found most succulent and dainty in the house. The monk went into the kitchen, opened the cupboards, and helped himself to everything he fancied, then descended to the cellars and carried off some flasks of wine under his arm, out of the abbey gates; and finding a pleasant shady nook among some bushes, picnicked on what he had brought, and ate and drank till he could contain no more, when he lay down and fell asleep. The dogs carried off the rest of his food, and the cellarer, who little liked the abstraction of the bottles of best wine, and had dogged his steps, when he heard him snoring, stole up to the half-consumed meal and recovered what was left of the precious wine. Towards evenfall the monk came home, tumbled into bed, was left undisturbed to sleep through matins and lauds, and rose when it pleased him, took another turn through the larder and cellar, helped himself to the best of everything, and spent another jovial day of eating, drinking, and sleeping, with no churchgoing to interrupt its calm delight. So he lived for some days, and the daily surfeiting began to tell on his constitution. One morning, as he went forth with some wine bottles under his arm, and a fat capon in his hood, he heard the schoolboys reciting an antiphon they had been learning, "Consider the terrible judgment of the Lord, and the dread sentence at the trial; consider the dread avenging severity of His judgment; consider the years of thine age, and now at last change thy ways for the better, or even one day before thy death correct thy life."[95]
The monk feeling fever in his blood, and hearing the solemn appeal, was conscience-struck, and sending for the abbot, he confessed his sinful life with heartfelt contrition, and falling ill with fever, died a few days after.
S. Renovatus was afterwards elected bishop of Mende, but nothing is related of the events of his episcopate. He is said to have been a very stately, handsome man, with a sweet expression of countenance. He was buried before the altar in the Church of S. Eulalia, whence the bones were raised and enshrined, and where they are still preserved.
S. DANIEL, C.
(A.D. 1411.)
[Martyrology of Camaldoli, and Bucelinus in his Menology of the Order of S. Benedict. Authority:—Augustine Fortunatus in his History of the Order of Camaldoli.]