March VI

St. Chrodegang, Bishop of Metz, Confessor

From Paul the Deacon, l. 2. de Gest. Longob. c. 16. Henschenius, p. 453. Mabill. Annal. Ben. l. 22, t. 2, & Act. SS. Ord. Ben. t. 4, p. 184. Ceillier, t. 18, p. 176. His life. published by George Von Eckart, Hist Franclæ Orient. t. 1, p. 912. Also Meurisse, Hist. des Eveques de Metz, 1. 2

A. D. 766.

This saint, nobly born in Brabant, then called Hasbain, was educated in the abbey of St. Tron, and for his great learning and virtue was made referendary, chancellor of France, and prime minister, by Charles Martel, mayor of the French palace, in 737. He was always meanly clad from his youth; he macerated his body by fasting, watching, and hair-cloths, and allowed his senses no superfluous gratifications of any kind. His charity to all in distress seemed to know no bounds; he supported an incredible number of poor, and was the protector and father of orphans and widows. Soon after the death of Charles Martel, he was chosen bishop of Metz, in 742. Prince Pepin, the son and successor of Charles, uncle to our saint by his mother, Landrada, would not consent to his being ordained, but on the condition that he should still continue at the helm of the state. Chrodegang always retained the same sweetness, humility, recollection, and simplicity in his behavior and dress. He constantly wore a rough hair-shirt under his clothes, spent good part of the night in watching, and usually at his devotions watered his cheeks with tears. Pope Stephen III. being oppressed by the Lombards, took refuge in France. Chrodegang went to conduct him over the Alps, and king Pepin was no sooner informed that he had passed these mountains in his way to France, but he sent Charles, his eldest son, to accompany him to Pont-yon, in Champagne, where the king was to receive him. The pope being three miles distant from that city, the king came to meet him, and having joined him, alighted from his horse, and prostrated himself, as did the queen, his children, and the lords of his court; and the king walked some time by the side of his horse to do him honor. The pope retired to the monastery of St. Deny’s; and king Pepin, in the year 754, sent St. Chrodegang on an embassy to Astulph, king of the Lombards, praying him out of respect to the holy apostles not to commit any hostilities against Rome, nor to oblige the Romans to superstitions contrary to their laws, and to restore the towns which he had taken from the holy see; but this embassy was without effect. The saint, in 755, converted the chapter of secular canons of his cathedral into a regular community, in which he was imitated by many other churches. He composed for his regular canons a rule, consisting of thirty-four articles. In the first he lays down humility for the foundation of all the rest.¹ He obliged the canons to confess at least twice a year to the bishop, before the beginning of Advent and Lent.² But these churches, even that of Metz, have again secularized themselves. The saint built and endowed the monasteries of St. Peter, that of Gorze, and a third in the diocese of Worms, called Lorsh or Laurisham. He died on the 6th of March, in 766, and was buried at Gorze, to which by his will, which is still extant, he demised several estates. He is named in the French German, and Belgic Martyrologies.

The zeal of St. Chrodegang in restoring the primitive and apostolic spirit in the clergy, particularly their fervor and devotion in the ministry of the altar, is the best proof of his ardor to advance the divine honor. To pay to Almighty God the public homage of praise and love, in the name of the whole church, is a function truly angelical. Those, who by the divine appointment are honored with this sublime charge, resemble those glorious heavenly spirits who always assist before the throne of God. What ought to be the sanctity of their lives! how pure their affections, how perfectly disengaged from all inordinate attachments to creatures, particularly how free from the least filth of avarice, and every other vice! All Christians have a part in this heavenly function.

B. Colette, Virgin and Abbess

From her life, written by her confessor, Peter de Vaux. See Helyot, Hist. des Ord. Relig. t. 7, p. 96. Miræus and Barbaza, Vies des Saints du Tiers Ordre de St. François, t. 2, p. 51.

A. D. 1447.

Colette Boilet, a carpenter’s daughter, was born at Corbie, in Picardy, in 1380. Her parents, out of devotion to St. Nicholas, gave her the name of Colette, the diminutive of Nicholas. She was brought up in the love of humiliations and austerities. Her desire to preserve her purity without the least blemish made her avoid as much as possible all company, even of persons of her own sex, unless it was sometimes to draw them from the love of the world by her moving discourses, which were attended with a singular blessing from almighty God. Humility was her darling virtue; and her greatest delight seemed to be in seeing herself contemned. She was so full of confusion at her own miseries and baseness, and was so contemptible in her own eyes, that she was ashamed to appear before any one, placed herself far below the greatest sinners, and studied by all sorts of humiliations to prevent the least motion of secret pride or self-conceit in her heart. She served the poor and the sick with an affection that charmed and comforted them. She lived in strict solitude in a small, poor, abandoned apartment in her father’s house, and spent her time there in manual labor and prayer. Being very beautiful, she begged of God to change her complexion, and her face became so pale and thin, that she could scarce be known for the same person. Yet a certain majesty of virtue, shining in her countenance, gave her charms conducive to the edification of others by the sweetness, modesty, and air of piety and divine love discernible in her looks. Her parents, who, though poor, were virtuous, and exceeding charitable, according to their abilities, and great peacemakers among their neighbors, seeing her directed by the Spirit of God, allowed her full liberty in her devotions. After their leath she distributed the little they left her among the poor, and retired among the Beguines, devout societies of women, established in several parts of Flanders, Picardy and Lorrain, who maintain themselves by the work of their hands, leading a middle kind of life between the secular and religious, but make no solemn vows. Not finding this way of life austere enough, she, by her confessor’s advice, took the habit of the third order of St. Francis, called the Penitents; and, three years after, that of the mitigated Clares or Urbanists, with the view of reforming that order, and reducing it to its primitive austerity. Having obtained of the abbot of Corbie a small hermitage, she spent in it three years in extraordinary austerity, near that abbey. After this, in order to execute the project she had long formed of re-establishing the primitive spirit and practice of her order, she went to the convent at Amiens, and from thence to several others. To succeed in her undertaking, it was necessary that she should be vested with proper authority: to procure which she made a journey to Nice in Provence, to wait on Peter de Luna, who, in the great schism, was acknowledged pope by the French under the name of Benedict XIII., and happened then to be in that city. He constituted her superioress-general of the whole order of St. Clare, with full power to establish in it whatever regulations she thought conducive to God’s honor and the salvation of others. She attempted to revive the primitive rule and spirit of St. Francis in the convents of the diocese of Paris, Beauvais, Noyon, and Amiens; but met with the most violent opposition, and was treated as a fanatic. She received all injuries with joy, and was not discouraged by human difficulties. Some time after she met with a more favorable reception in Savoy, and her reformation began to take root there, and passed thence into Burgundy, France, Flanders, and Spain. Many ancient houses received it, that of Besanzon being the first, and she lived to erect seventeen new ones. Several houses of Franciscan friars received the same. But Leo X., in 1517, by a special bull, united all the different reformations of the Franciscans under the name of Observantines: and thus the distinction of Colettines is extinct. So great was her love for poverty, in imitation of that of Christ, that she never put on so much as sandals, going always barefoot, and would have no churches or convents but what were small and mean. Her habit was not only of most coarse stuff, but made of above a hundred patches sewed together. She continually inculcated to her nuns the denial of their own wills in all things, as Christ, from his first to his last breath, did the will of his heavenly Father: saying, that all self-will was the broad way to hell. The sacred passion of Christ was the subject of her constant meditation. On Fridays, from six in the morning till six at night, she continued in this meditation, without eating or doing any other thing, but referring all her thoughts and affections to it with a flood of tears; also during the Holy-Week, and whenever she assisted at mass: she often fell into ecstasies when she considered it. She showed a particular respect to the holy cross; but, above all, to Christ present in the blessed eucharist, when she appeared in raptures of adoration and love. She often purified her conscience by sacramental confession before she heard mass, to assist thereat with the greater purity of soul. Her zeal made her daily to pour forth many fervent prayers for the conversion of sinners, and also for the souls in purgatory, often with many tears. Being seized with her last sickness in her convent at Ghent, she received the sacraments of the church, foretold her death, and happily expired in her sixty-seventh year, on the 6th of March, in 1447. Her body is exposed to veneration in the church of that convent called Bethleem, in Ghent. She was never canonized, nor is she named in the Roman Martyrology: but Clement VIII., Paul V., Gregory XIII., and Urban VIII., have approved of an office in her honor for the whole Franciscan order, and certain cities. Her body was taken up at Ghent, in 1747, and several miracles wrought on the occasion were examined by the ordinary of the place, who sent the process and relation of them to Rome.

St. Fridolin, A.

He was an Irish or Scotch abbot, who, leaving his own country, founded several monasteries in Austria, Burgundy, and Switzerland: the last was that of Sekingen, in an isle in the Rhine, now one of the four forest towns belonging to the house of Austria. In this monastery he died, in 538. He is the tutelar patron of the Swiss canton of Glaris, who carry in their coat of arms his picture in the Benedictin habit, though he was not of that order. See Molanus, Addit. ad Usuard; Pantaleon, Prosopographiæ Vir. Illustr. German. ad an. 502; King in Calend Wion, Lignum Vitæ, l. 3.

St. Baldrede, Bishop of Glasgow, C.

He was immediate successor of St. Mungo, in that see, established many nunneries in Scotland, and died in the province of Laudon, about the year 608. His relics were very famous in many churches in Scotland. See Adam King, in Calend., and the historians Boetius, Major, Leslie, &c.

SS. Kyneburge, Kyneswide, And Tibba

The two first were daughters of Penda, the cruel pagan king of Mercia, and sisters to three successive Christian kings, Peada, Wulfere, and Ethelred, and to the pious prince Merowald. Kyneburge, as Bede informs us,¹ was married to Alcfrid, eldest son of Oswi, and in his father’s life-time king of Bernicia. They are said to have lived in perpetual continency. By his death she was left a widow in the bloom of life, and, renouncing the world, governed a nunnery which she built; or, according to others, found built by her brother Wulfere, in a moist fenny place, on the confines of the counties of Huntingdon and Northampton, then called Dormundcaster, afterwards, from her, Kyneburgecaster, now Caster. The author of her life in Capgrave says, that she lived here a mirror of all sanctity, and that no words can express the bowels of charity with which she cherished the souls which served God under her care; and how watchful she was over their comportment, and how zealous in instructing and exhorting them; and with what floods of tears she implored for them the divine grace and mercy. She had a wonderful compassion for the poor, and strongly exhorted her royal brothers to alms-giving and works of mercy. Kyneswide and Kynedride (though many confounded the latter with St. Kyneburge) were also daughters of Penda, left very young at his death. By an early consecration of their virginity to God, they devoted themselves to his service, and both embraced a religious state. Kyneswide took the holy veil in the monastery of Dormundcaster.

The bodies of these saints were translated to Peterborough, where their festival was kept on the 6th of March, together with that of Saint Tibba, a holy virgin, their kinswoman, who, having spent many years in solitude and devotion, passed to glory on the 13th of December. Camden informs us,² that she was honored with particular devotion at Rihal, a town near the river Wash, in Rutlandshire. See Ingulphus, Hist. p. 850; Will. of Malmesbury l. 4, de Pontif. p. 29; Capgrave and Harpsfield, sæc. 7, c. 23.

St. Cadroe, C.

He was a noble Scotsman, son of count (or rather laird) Fokerstrach, and travelling into France, he took the monastic habit at Saint Bennet’s on the Loire. He afterwards reformed the monastery of St. Clement, at Metz, in 960, and died in a visit which he made to Adelaide, mother of the emperor Otho I., at Neristein, about the year 975. His relics are kept at St. Clement’s, at Metz, and he is honored on the 6th of March. See Mabillon, sec. 5, Ben. p. 480, and sec. 6, p. 28; Henschenius; and Calmet, Hist. de Lor. l. 19, n. 67, p. 1011.