ST. PAUL, BISHOP OF LEON, C.
HE was a noble Briton, a native of Cornwall,
cousin of St. Samson, and his fellow-disciple under St. Iltutus. We
need no other proof of his wonderful fervor and progress in virtue,
and all the exercises of a monastic life, than the testimony of St.
Iltutus, by whose advice St. Paul left the monastery to embrace a
more perfect eremitical life in a retired place in the same country.
Some time after, our saint sailing from Cornwall, passed into
Armorica, and continued the same austere eremitical life in a small
island on the coast of the Osismians, a barbarous idolatrous people
in Armorica, or Little Britain. Prayer and contemplation were his
whole employment, and bread and water his only food, except on great
festivals, in which he took with his bread a few little fish. The
saint, commiserating the blindness of the pagan inhabitants on the
coast, passed over to the continent, and instructed them in the
faith. Withur, count or governor of Bas, and all that coast, seconded
by king Childebert, procured his ordination to the episcopal dignity,
notwithstanding his tears to prevent it. Count Withur, who resided in
the Isle of Bas, bestowed his own house on the saint to be converted
into a monastery; and St. Paul placed in it certain fervent monks,
who had accompanied him from Wales and Cornwall. He was himself
entirely taken up in his pastoral functions, and his diligence in
acquitting himself of every branch of his obligations was equal to
his apprehension of their weight. When he had completed the
conversion of that country, he resigned his bishopric to a disciple,
and retired into the isle of Bas, where he died in holy solitude, on
the 12th of March, about the year 573, near one hundred years old.*
During the inroads of the Normans, his relics were removed to the
abbey of Fleury, or St. Bennet’s on the Loire, but were lost
when the Calvinists plundered that church. Leon, the ancient city of
the Osismians, in which he fixed his see, takes his name. His
festival occurs in the ancient breviary of Leon, on the 10th of
October, perhaps the day of the translation of his relics. For in the
ancient breviary of Nantes, and most others, he is honored on the
12th of March. See Le Cointe’s Annals, the Bollandists on this
day, and Lobineau in the Lives of the Saints of Brittany, from his
acts compiled by a monk of Fleury, about the close of the tenth
century.
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