The Lives of the Saints Volume 1 - St. Patrick's Basilica

on which it stands, now the rich abbey of St. Peter's; the other took
the name of St. Bavo, from him who gave his estate for its foundation;
this became the cathedral in 1559, when the city was created a bishop's
see. Besides many pious foundations, both in France and Flanders, in
639, he built the great abbey three leagues from Tourney, called Elnon,
from the river on which it stands; but it has long since taken the name
of St. Amand, with its town and warm mineral baths. In 649 he was chosen
bishop of Maestricht; but three years after he resigned that see to St.
Remaclus, and returned to his missions, to which his compassion for the
blindness of infidels always inclined {370} his heart. He continued his
labors among them till the age of eighty-six, when, broken with
infirmities, he retired to Orion, which house he governed as abbot four
years more, spending that time in preparing his soul for his passage to
eternity, which happened in 675. His body is honorably kept in that
abbey. The Sarum Breviary honored St. Amandus and St. Vedast with an
office of nine lessons. See Buzelin, Gallo-Flandria, and Henschenius, 6
Feb. p. 815, who has published five different lives of this saint.
Footnotes:
1. See Henschenius. p. 828.
ST. BARSANUPHIUS, ANCHORET.
HAVING renounced the world, he passed some years in the monastery of St.
Seridon, near Gaza in Palestine, in the happy company of that holy
abbot, John the prophet, the blessed Dorotheus, and St. Dositheus. That
he might live in the constant exercise of heavenly contemplation, the
sweetness of which he had begun to relish, he left the monastery about
the year 540, and in a remote cell led a life rather angelical than
human. He wrote a treatise against the Origenist monks, which Montfaucon
has published in his Bibl. Coislin. The Greeks held this saint in so
great veneration, that his picture was placed in the sanctuary of the
church of Sancta Sophia in Constantinople, with those of St. Antony and
St. Ephrem, as we are informed by the Studite monk who wrote the preface
to the Instructions of St. Dorotheus, translated into French by abbot
Rance of la Trappe. The relics of St. Barsanuphius were brought in the
ninth century to Oria, near Siponto in Italy, where he is honored as
principal patron, on the 7th of February. The Greek Synaxaries have his
office on the 6th of this month. Baronius placed his name in the Roman
Martyrology on the 11th of April. See on him Evagrius, (who finished his
history in 593,) l. 4, c. 33. Pagi ad an. 548, n. 10. Bulteau, Hist.
Mon. d'Orient. l. 4, c. 9, p. 695.
FEBRUARY VII.
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