St. Paschal Baylon, C.

From his two lives, one written by John Ximenes, his companion; the other, In order to his canonization See other monuments in Papebroke, t. 4; Maij, p. 48.

A. D. 1592.

The state of poverty was honored by the choice of our blessed Redeemer, and hath been favored with his special blessing. It removes men from many dangers and temptations, and furnishes them with perpetual occasions for the exercise of self-denial, patience, penance, resignation to the divine will, and every other heroic Christian virtue: yet these great means of salvation are by many, through ignorance, impatience, and inordinate desires, often perverted into occasions of their temporal and eternal misery. Happy are they who, by making a right use of the spiritual advantages which this state, so dear to our divine Redeemer, offers them, procure to themselves present peace, joy, and every solid good; and make every circumstance of that condition in which providence hath placed them a step to perfect virtue and to everlasting happiness. This in an eminent degree was the privilege of St. Paschal Baylon. He was born in 1540, at Torre-Hermosa, a small country town in the kingdom of Aragon. His parents were day-labourers, and very virtuous; and to their example our saint was greatly indebted for the spirit of piety and devotion, which he seemed to have sucked in from his mother’s milk. Their circumstances were too narrow to afford his being sent to school; but the pious child, out of an earnest desire of attaining to so great a means of instruction, carried a book with him into the fields where he watched the sheep, and desired those that he met to teach him the letters; and thus, in a short time, being yet very young, he learned to read. This advantage he made use of only to improve his soul in devotion and piety: books of amusement he never would look into; but the lives of the saints, and, above all, meditations on the life of Christ, were his chiefest delight. He loved nothing but what was serious and of solid advantage, at a time of life in which many seem scarce susceptible of such impressions. When he was of a proper age, he engaged with a master to keep his flocks as under-shepherd: he was delighted with the innocent and quiet life his state permitted him to lead. That solitary life had charms for him. Whatever he saw was to him an object of faith and devotion. He read continually in the great book of nature; and from every object raised his soul to God, whom he contemplated and praised in all his works. Besides external objects, he had almost continually a spiritual book in his hands, which served to instruct and to inflame his soul in the love and practice of virtue. His master, who was a person of singular piety, was charmed with his edifying conduct, and made him an offer to adopt him for his son, and to make him his heir. But Paschal, who desired only the goods of another life, was afraid that those of this world would prove to him an incumbrance; he therefore modestly declined the favor, desiring always to remain in his humble state, as being more conformable to that which Christ chose for himself on earth, who came not into the world to be served, but to serve. He was often discovered praying on his knees under some tree, while his flocks were browsing on the hills. It was by this secret entertainment of his soul with God, in the most profound humility, and perfect purity of his affections, that he acquired a most sublime science arid experience in spiritual things at which those who were the most advanced were struck with admiration He could truly say with David: Blessed is he whom thou thyself shalt instruct, O Lord.¹ He spoke of God and of virtue with an inimitable unction and experimental light, and with sentiments which the Holy Ghost alone forms in souls which are perfectly disengaged from earthly things, and replenished with his heavenly tire. Often was he seen ravished in holy prayer; and frequently was not able to conceal from the eyes of men the vehement ardor of the divine love with which his soul melted in an excess of heavenly sweetness. He felt in himself what many servants of God assure us of, that “the consolation which the Holy Ghost frequently infuses into pious souls, is greater than all the pleasures of the world together, could they be enjoyed by one man. It makes the heart to dissolve and melt through excess of joy, under which it is unable to contain itself.”² In these sentiments did this servant of God sing with David: My soul shall rejoice in the Lord, and shall be delighted in his salvation. All my bones shall say, O Lord, who is like to thee!³ The reward of virtue is reserved for heaven; but some comforts are not denied during the present time of trial. Even in this vale of tears, God will make its desert as a place of pleasure; and its wilderness as the garden of the Lord. Joy and gladness shall be found in it, thanksgiving and the voice of praise. Isa. 51:3. It is sufficiently understood that the saint did not receive these heavenly comforts without severe interior trials, and a constan practice of self-denial, by which his heart was crucified to the world. The dew of extraordinary spiritual comforts never falls on unmortified souls, which seek the delights of this world. St. Paschal in his poverty joined alms with his continual prayer; and not having any other means to relieve the poor, always gave them a good part of his own dinner which was sent him into the fields.

How great soever his love was for his profession, he found however several difficulties in it which made him think of leaving it. He was not able, notwithstanding all the care he could take, to hinder a flock of goats he had in charge from sometimes trespassing on another’s ground. This occasioned his giving over the inspection of that flock. But he found other troubles in taking care of other cattle. Some of his companions, not having the same piety with himself, were but too much addicted to cursing, quarrelling, and fighting; nor were they to be reclaimed by his gentle rebukes on these accounts. He was therefore determined to leave them, not to participate in their crimes. And to learn the will of God in this important choice of a state of life in which he might most faithfully serve him, he redoubled his prayers, fasts, and other austerities. After some time spent in this manner, he determined to become a religious man. Those to whom he first disclosed his inclination to a religious state, pointed out to him several convents richly endowed. But that circumstance alone was enough to disgus him; and his answer was: “I was born poor, and I am resolved to live and die in poverty and penance.” Being at that time twenty years of age he left his master, his friends, and his country, and went into the kingdom of Valentia, where was an austere convent of barefoot reformed Franciscans, called Soccolans, which stood in a desert solitude, but at no great distance from the town of Montfort. He addressed himself to the fathers of this house for spiritual advice; and, in the mean time, he entered into the service of certain farmers in the neighborhood to keep their sheep. He continued here his penitential and retired life in assiduous prayer, and was known in the whole country by the name of the Holy Shepherd. To sequester himself from the world, he made the more haste to petition for the habit of a lay-brother in the house above-mentioned: and was admitted in 1564. The fathers desired to persuade him to enter himself among the clerks, or those who aspired to holy orders, and sing the divine office in the choir; but they were obliged to yield to his humility, and admit him among the lay-brothers of the community. He was not only a fervent novice, which we often see, but also a most fervent religious man, always advancing, and never losing ground. Though his rule was most austere, he added continually to its severity, but always with simplicity of heart, without the least attachment to his own will; and whenever he was admonished of any excess in his practices of mortification, he most readily confined himself to the letter of his rule. The meanest employments always gave him the highest satisfaction. Whenever he changed convents, according to the custom of his order, the better to prevent any secret attachments of the heart, he never complained of any thing, nor so much as said that he found any thing in one house more agreeable than in another; because, being entirely dead to himself, he everywhere sought only God. He never allowed himself a moment of repose between the Church and cloister duties, and his work; nor did his labor interrupt his prayer. He had never more than one habit, and that always threadbare. He walked without sandals in the snows, and in the roughest roads. He accommodated himself to all places and seasons, and was always content, cheerful, mild, affable, and full of respect for all. He thought himself honored if employed in any painful and low office to serve any one.

The general of the order happening to be at Paris, Paschal was sent thither to him about some necessary business of his province. Many of the cities through which he was to pass in France, were in the hands of the Huguenots, who were then in arms. Yet he offered himself to a martyrdom of obedience, travelled in his habit, and without so much as sandals on his feet, was often pursued by the Huguenots with sticks and stones, and received a wound on one shoulder of which he remained lame as long as he lived. He was twice taken for a spy; but God delivered him out of all dangers. On the very day on which he arrived at his convent from this tedious journey, he went out to his work and other duties as usual. He never spoke of any thing that had happened to him in his journey unless asked; and then was careful to suppress whatever might reflect on him the least honor or praise. He had a singular devotion to the mother of God, whose intercession he never ceased to implore that he might be preserved from sin. The holy sacrament of the altar was the object of his most tender devotion; also the passion of our divine Redeemer. He spent, especially towards the end of his life, a considerable part of the night at the foot of the altar on his knees, or prostrate on the ground. In prayer he was often favored with ecstasies and raptures. He died at Villa Reale near Valentia, on the 17th of May, in 1592, being fifty-two years old. His corpse was exposed three days, during which time the great multitudes which from all parts visited the church, were witnesses to many miracles by which God attested the sanctity of his servant. St. Paschal was beatified by Pope Paul V. in 1618, and canonized by Alexander VIII. in 1690.

If Christians in every station endeavored with their whole strength continually to advance in virtue, the Church would be filled with saints. But alas! though it be an undoubted maxim, that not to go on in a spiritual life is to fall back, “Nothing is more rare,” says St. Bernard, “than to find persons who always press forward. We see more converted from vice to virtue, than increase their fervor in virtue.” This is something dreadful. The same father assigns two principal reasons. First, many who begin well, after some time grow again remiss in the exercises of mortification and prayer, and return to the amusements, pleasures, and vanities of a worldly life. Secondly, others who are regular and constant in exterior duties, neglect to watch over and cultivate their interior; so that some interior spiritual vice insinuates itself into their affections, and renders them an abomination in the eyes of God. “A man,” says St. Bernard,⁴ “who gives himself up entirely to exterior exercises without looking seriously into his own heart to see what passes there, imposes upon himself, imagining that he is something while he is nothing. His eyes being always fixed on his exterior actions, he flatters himself that he goes on well, and neither sees nor feels the secret worm which gnaws and consumes his heart. He keeps all fasts, assists at all parts of the divine office, and fails in no exercise of piety or penance; yet God declares, ‘His heart is far from me.’ He only employs his hands in fulfilling the precepts, and his heart is hard and dry. His duties are complied with by habit and a certain rotation: he omits not a single iota of all his exterior employments; but while he strains at a gnat, he swallows a camel. In his heart he is a slave to self-will, and is a prey to avarice, vain-glory, and ambition: one or other or all these vices together reign in his soul.”

Saint Possidius, B. C.

He was a native of the proconsular Africa, and had his education under the great St. Austin. In 397 he was chosen bishop of Calama in Numidia which diocese he found distracted by the factions both of heathens and Donatists. In 404, a party of the latter dragged him out of his house, beat him, and threatened his life. All the revenge he took of them was to obtain their pardon from the emperor. Four years after this, the idolaters, in a riotous festival on the 1st of June, had the insolence to dance round the church, throw stones into it, and set it on fire, wounding several of the clergy, and killing one upon the spot. Nectarius, a principal person among the heathens, who had no share in this tumult, wrote to St. Austin to beg him to intercede with the emperor for the pardon of the rioters, observing to him that it is the duty of the Christian pastors to employ themselves in works of mercy and peace. By the interposition of Possidius their punishment was only an order which the emperor sent for the breaking down their idols, with a prohibition of their abominable festivals and sacrifices. When the relics of St. Stephen were brought into Africa, about the year 410, our holy bishop was careful to enrich Calama with a portion of them, by which several miracles were there wrought, as St. Austin informs us.¹ St. Possidius was doubtless one of those bishops who established among the clergy of their cathedrals a monastic regularity in imitation of St. Austin, and according to the rule by him instituted, as our saint mentions in the life of that great doctor; and St. Austin speaks of the poor religious men of Calama. The Vandals passed over from Spain into Africa with an army of fourscore thousand veteran soldiers, long accustomed to blood and plunder; and made themselves in a short time masters of Mauritania, Numidia, and the proconsular province, except the strong fortresses of Carthage, Cirta, and Hippo. They pillaged the whole country and the towns which lay in their way; and among others Calama, which seems to have never since lifted up its head. St. Possidius took refuge in Hippo with his dear master, St. Austin, who soon after died in his arms in 430, during the siege of that city, which some time after fell into the hands of the barbarians. These were severe trials to our saint, who from that time lived in perpetual banishment from his flock. He wrote the life of St. Austin, with a catalogue of his works. The Italians say, that from Africa he came into Italy, and died at Mirandola. That city and Rhegio in Apulia honor him as patron. The regular canons keep his festival on the 17th of May, and regard him as one of the most illustrious fathers of their order. See the life and works of St. Austin and Papebroke, who show that it is a mistake to confound St. Possidius with Possidonius, another African bishop sometimes mentioned with him in the same councils, t. 4, Maij, p. 27. See also Ceillier, t. 12, p. 261.

St. Maden, or Madern, C.

Honored in Brittany, where he is patron of a parish in the diocese of St. Malo: and probably of another in the same diocese, called Plu-Mauden, as F. Lobineau takes notice.¹ His name was also in the highest veneration in Cornwall, where he lived and died in a hermitage near the Land’s End, where a chapel which bore his name was long famous for pilgrimages and miracles.

Among the miracles ascribed to St. Madern, that which follows was attested by Dr. Joseph Hall, the Protestant bishop of Exeter, who in his last visitation of this diocese, before he was translated to the see of Norwich in 1641, made a juridical and strict inquiry into all the circumstances of this fact, and authentically declared the evidence of the miracle to be incontestable. The strong prejudices and inveterate hatred against the Catholic religion, which he discovers in his Dissuasive from Popery to W. D. revolted, (viz., a late convert to the Catholic faith,) and in many other parts of his voluminous writings, and of which the history of his whole life is a constant proof, render his testimony the more unexceptionable. In his treatise On the Invisible World,² he speaks of a miraculous cure wrought at St. Madern’s well, in the following words: “The commerce that we have with the good spirits is not now discerned by the eye, but is, like themselves, spiritual. Yet not so, but that even in bodily occasions we have many times insensible helps from them; in such manner as that by the effects we can boldly say: Here hath been an angel, though we see him not. Of this kind was that (no less than miraculous) cure which at St. Madern’s in Cornwall was wrought upon a poor cripple, John Trelille, whereof (besides the attestation of many hundreds of neighbors) I took a strict and personal examination it that last visitation which I either did or ever shall hold. This man, that for sixteen years together was fain to walk upon his hands, by reason of the close contraction of the sinews of his legs, (upon three admonitions in a dream to wash in that well,) was suddenly so restored to his limbs, that I saw him able to walk and get his own maintenance. I found here was neither art nor collusion: the thing done, the author invisible.”

Another writer, a curious searcher into nature, and of great learning, who lived in that country about the same time, gives a fuller account of the same miraculous cure, as follows:³ “I will relate one miracle more done in our own country, to the great wonder of the neighboring inhabitants, but a few years ago, viz., about the year 1640. The process of the business was told the king when at Oxford, which he caused to be further examined. It was this:—A certain boy of twelve years old, called John Trelille, in the county of Cornwall, not far from the Land’s End, as they were playing at foot-ball, snatching up the ball ran away with it; whereupon a girl in anger struck him with a thick stick on the back-bone, and so bruised or broke it, that for sixteen years after he was forced to go creeping on the ground. In this condition he arrived to the twenty-eighth year of his age, when he dreamed that if he did but bathe in St. Madern’s well, or in the stream running from it, he should recover his former strength and health. This is a place in Cornwall from the remains of ancient devotion still frequented by Protestants on the Thursdays in May, and especially on the feast of Corpus Christi; near to which well is a chapel dedicated to St. Madern, where is yet an altar, and right against it a grassy hillock (made every year anew by the country people) which they call St. Madern’s bed. The chapel-roof is quite decayed; but a kind of thorn of itself shooting forth of the old walls, so extends its boughs that it covers the whole chapel, and supplies as it were a roof. On a Thursday in May, assisted by one Periman his neighbor, entertaining great hopes from his dream, thither he crept, and lying before the altar, and praying very fervently that he might regain his health and the strength of his limbs, he washed his whole body in the stream that flowed from the well, and ran through the chapel: after which, having slept about an hour and a half on St. Madern’s bed, through the extremity of pain he felt in his nerves and arteries, he began to cry out, and his companion helping and lifting him up, he perceived his hams and joints somewhat extended, and himself become stronger, insomuch, that partly with his feet, partly with his hands, he went much more erect than before. Before the following Thursday he got two crutches, resting on which he could make shift to walk, which before he could not do. And coming to the chapel as before, after having bathed himself he slept on the same bed, and awaking found himself much stronger and more upright; and so leaving one crutch in the chapel, he went home with the other. The third Thursday he returned to the chapel, and bathed as before, slept, and when he awoke rose up quite cured; yea, grew so strong, that he wrought day-labor among other hired servants; and four years after listed himself a soldier in the king’s army, where he behaved himself with great stoutness, both of mind and body. at length, in 1644, he was slain at Lime in Dorsetshire.” The author takes notice that Thursday and Friday were the days chosen out of devotion to the blessed Eucharist and the Passion of Christ.

St. Maw, C.

This name in the Cornish language signifies a boy.¹ He was a native of Ireland, and came young into Cornwall that he might live to God alone in the closest solitude, in the practice of the most austere penance and the exercises of divine prayer. His hermitage was on the sea-coast, near the spacious harbor of Falmouth. The place is still called St. Mawes, in Latin S. Mauditi Castrum, where a church, and in the churchyard a chair of solid stone and a miraculous or holy well still bear his name. See Leland’s Itiner., vol. ix., p. 79; vol. iii., fol. 13, alias 19, where he writes that this saint had been a bishop in Britain, and was painted as a schoolmaster.²

St. Cathan, B. C.

He flourished in the sixth or seventh century. His relics in the isle of Bute were so famous in Scotland, that the island was often called Kil-cathan.¹ See Breviar. Aberd. and Scoti-chr.

St. Silave, or Silan, B. C.

He was an Irish monk, and abbot of the monastery of St. Brendan. Being afterwards ordained bishop, he governed his diocese with great zeal and charity. The latter part of his life he spent in Italy, where he was styled the Father of the Poor. He died at Lucca in 1100, and was canonized by pope Lucius III. in 1183. See Colgan, in MSS. ad 17 Maij.

¹ Psal. 93:18.

² Ruisbroch. Spir Nupt. l. 2, c. 19.

³ Psal. 35

⁴ St. Berr. Serm. 2, in Cap Jejunij.

¹ L 22. de Civil, c. 8.

¹ Hist. des Saints de la Bretagne, p. 21.

² Bp. Hall, on the lnvis. World, l. 1, sect. 8.

³ Ex R. P. Francisci Conventr. Paralipom. Philosoph., c. 4, p. 68. Referam adhuc unum miraculum in patriâ nostrâ, paucis abhinc annis, &c.

¹ See Borlase’s Cornish Vocabulary, V. Maw.

² Leland Itiner. vol. iii., fol. 35, alias 49, in his account of St. Sativola, V., who was born at Exeter, be headed by Feniseca through the contrivance of her stepmother, and honored ns titular saint of a church in Cornwall, quotes on these saints the Legends of the Saints abridged for the use of the church of Exeter, by bishop John of Grandison, in the year 1336, of whom he speaks at large, fol. 37, alias 53.

He mentions many places of great devotion in that country, as St. Piran’s alias Kenerin’s, a sanctuary two miles from Gilling Creek. The church of St. Budocus, a holy Irishman, who lived and died a recluse there. St. Germoc’s church, three miles from St. Michael’s, with his chair and a holy well in the churchyard: the church of St. Buriene, a holy Irish virgin, who lived there a recluse; to which king Athelstan granted the privilege of a sanctuary, and built there a famous college under her patronage and name. St. Ide’s island, famous for pilgrimages to her sepulchre. Saint Iäs, who was daughter to an Irish nobleman, and disciple of St. Barr. She arrived here with many companions. Dinan, a great lord in Cornwall, built a church for her use, which since bears her name, in a peninsula and on the rock of Pendinas. St. Mogun’s church on Mogun Creek. St. Geron’s, St. Juste’s, St. Carac’s, &c. See the life of Kiaran on the 5th of March.

¹ Kil signifies a church or oratory as Kllbrald, Kilpatrick, &c.

 Butler, A. (1903). The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs and Other Principal Saints (Vol. 2, pp. 343–349). New York: P. J. Kenedy.