Maurists Benedictine Congregation

Note to the previous Post on Saints Maurus & Placid

Confusion with Saint Maurus Abbot of Glanfeuil A long Life of St. Maurus appeared in the late 9th century, supposedly composed by one of St. Maurus's contemporaries. According to this account, the bishop of Le Mans, in western France, sent a delegation asking Benedict for a group of monks to travel from Benedict's new abbey of Monte Cassino to establish monastic life in France according to the Rule of St. Benedict. The Life recounts the long journey of St. Maurus and his companions from Italy to France, accompanied by many adventures and miracles as St. Maurus is transformed from the obedient disciple of Benedict into a powerful, miracle-working holy man in his own right. According to this account, after the great trek, St. Maurus founded Glanfeuil Abbey as the first Benedictine monastery in France. It was located on the south bank of the Loire river, a few miles east of Angers. The nave of its thirteenth-century church and some vineyards remain today (according to tradition, the chenin grape was first cultivated at this monastery.) Scholars now believe that this Life of Maurus is a forgery by the 9th-century abbot, Odo of Glanfeuil. It was composed, as were many such saints' lives in Carolingian France, to popularize local saints' cults. The bones of St. Maurus had supposedly been found at Glanfeuil by one of Odo's immediate predecessors. By the mid-9th century, the abbey had become a local pilgrimage site supplementing (or rivalling) the nearby abbeys of Fleury, which claimed to have the bones of St. Benedict himself, and Le Mans, which had supposedly obtained the bones of St. Benedict's sister, St. Scholastica. The study that accompanied the revision in 1969 of the Roman Catholic calendar of saints[1] states: "Saint Maurus, the disciple of Saint Benedict, who is mentioned in the Dialogues of Saint Gregory the Great, is now universally distinguished from Maurus of Glanfeuil in the region of Angers in France, who is mentioned in the Roman Martyrology[2] on 15 January." Odo and the monks of Glanfeuil had been obliged to flee to Paris in the face of Vikings maurauding along the Loire. There Odo reestablished the cult of St. Maurus at the suburban Parisian abbey of Saint-Pierre-des-Fossés, later renamed Saint-Maur-des-Fossés. The cult of St. Maurus slowly spread to monasteries throughout France and by the 12th century had been adopted by Monte Cassino in Italy, along with a revived cult of St. Placidus. By the late Middle Ages, the cult of St. Maurus, often associated with St. Placidus, had spread to all Benedictine monasteries. He was sometimes identified with the semi-legendary Saint Amaro, who is said to have travelled to the Earthly Paradise. The Congregation of St. Maur took its name from him. (Wikipedia)