Saint Maurus (or Maur)
Abbot of the Order of St. Benedict
(510–584)

Among the several noblemen who placed their sons under the care of Saint Benedict to be brought up in piety and learning, Equitius, one of that rank, left with him his son Maurus, then but twelve years old, in 522. The youth surpassed all his fellow monks in the discharge of monastic duties, and when he was grown up, Saint Benedict made him his coadjutor in the government of Subiaco. Maurus was a model of perfection to all brethren and favored by God with the gift of miracles by his singleness of heart and profound humility.

Saint Placidus, a fellow monk, the son of the senator Tertullus, going one day to fetch water, fell into the lake and was carried the distance of a bow–shot from the bank. Saint Benedict saw this in the spirit in his cell and bid Maurus to run and draw him out. Maurus obeyed, walked upon the waters without perceiving it, and dragged out Placidus by the hair without sinking. He attributed the miracle to the prayers of Saint Benedict, the holy abbot, to the obedience of the disciple soon after that holy patriarch retired to Cassino, which he called Saint Maurus thither, in the year 528.

Saint Maurus came to France in 543, founded, by the liberality of king Theodebert, the great abbey of Glanfeuil, now called Saint-Maur-sur-Loire, which he governed for several years. In 581, he resigned the abbacy to Bertulf. He passed the remainder of his life in close solitude, in the uninterrupted contemplation of heavenly things, to prepare himself for his passage to eternity. After two years thus employed, he fell sick of a fever, with a pain in his side: he received the church’s sacraments, lying on sackcloth before the altar of Saint Martin, and in the same posture expired on the 15th of January, in the year 584. He was buried on the right side of the altar in the same church, and on a roll of parchment laid in his tomb was inscribed this epitaph: “Maurus, a monk, and deacon, who came into France in the days of king Theodebert, and died the eighteenth day before February.” Saint Maurus is named in the ancient French litany composed by Alcuin and in the Martyrologies of Florus, Usuard, and others.

For fear of the Normans, in the ninth century, his body was translated to several places; lastly, in 868, to Saint Peter’s des Fosses, then a Benedictine abbey, near Paris, where it was received with great solemnity by Æneas, bishop of Paris. A history of this translation, written by Eudo, at that time abbot of Saint Peter’s des Fosses, is still extant. This Abbaye des Fossés (now Saint-Maur Abbey) was founded by Blidegisilus, deacon of the church of Paris, in the time of King Clovis II and Audebert, bishop of Paris: Saint Babolen was the first abbot. This monastery was reformed by Saint Mayeul, abbot of Cluny, in 988. In 1533, it was secularized by Clement VII at the request of Francis I. The deanery united to the bishopric of Paris, but the church and village have been born the name of Saint Maur for several ages. The abbey of Glanfeuil, now called Saint Maur–sur–Loire, was subjected to Abbaye des Fossés from the reign of Charles the Bald to the year 1096, in which Urban II, at the solicitation of the count of Anjou, re-established its primitive independence.

Our ancestors revered Saint Maurus under the Norman kings: the noble family of Seymour (from the French Saint Maur) borrowed its name from him, as Camden observes in his Remains. The church of Saint Peter’s des Fosses, two leagues from Paris, now called Saint Maurus’s, was secularized and made collegiate in 1533. The canons were removed to Saint Louis, formerly called Saint Thomas of Canterbury, at the Louvre in Paris, in 1750. The same year the relics of Saint Maurus were translated thence to the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where they are preserved in a rich shrine. An arm of this saint was, with great devotion, translated to Mount Cassino in the eleventh century. By its touch, a demoniac was afterward delivered, as is related by Desiderius, at that time abbot of Mount Cassino, later pope, named Victor III.

[Butler, Alban. The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints.
Edited by Michael Murphy. Used with permission.