It's the Feast of
XVI Sun of Pentecost,
2nd Class, with the color of
Green. In this episode: the meditation: "The Virtue of Religion", today's news from the Church: "In Salzburg, Artisans Are Building a Church "For Eternity"", and today's thought from the Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.
Have feedback or questions about the DD or our other shows?
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Sources Used Today:
- "The Virtue of Religion" — From the Assumption to Advent
- "In Salzburg, Artisans Are Building a Church "For Eternity"" (FSSPX.news)
- The Spiritual Life — Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (Angelus Press)
Please support our new project, the Archbishop Lefebvre Biography Audiobook:
Saint Amatus of Remiremont is one of those early medieval saints whose story involves an unusual amount of moving farther and farther away from everyone, only to discover that people kept following him.
He was born around the year 560 in the region of Grenoble in southeastern France. As a young man, Amatus entered the famous monastery of Agaunum, today's Saint-Maurice in Switzerland. It was built near the traditional site of the martyrdom of the Theban Legion and had become one of the great monastic centers of the region.
Amatus liked monastic life.
He just wanted even more silence.
So he eventually withdrew to live as a hermit high in the mountains. Tradition places him near a rocky retreat where he spent years praying, fasting, and living largely alone.
That worked for a while.
Then Eustace of Luxeuil came looking for him.
Eustace persuaded Amatus to leave his solitude and join the great monastery of Luxeuil, founded by the Irish missionary Saint Columbanus. Amatus became a preacher there and soon attracted the attention of a wealthy nobleman named Romaric.
Romaric listened to Amatus, converted his enormous estate into a religious foundation, and eventually became a monk himself.
Together, the two men established a monastery in the Vosges Mountains around the year 620.
And this monastery was unusual.
Rather than following the arrangement that would later become standard in Western monasteries, Remiremont developed as a double monastery, with communities of men and women living separately but sharing a common spiritual life. According to early tradition, the monks maintained something called the laus perennis, or "perpetual praise," organizing themselves so that the Psalms and prayers continued through the day and night.
Imagine building an entire community around the idea that somebody should always be praying.
Amatus became its first abbot, while Romaric eventually succeeded him. The monastery became so closely associated with Romaric that the surrounding settlement eventually took his name: Remiremont, essentially "Romaric's mountain."
That town still exists in northeastern France.
Over the centuries, the monastery changed dramatically. Its community of women eventually became an influential house of noble canonesses, and Remiremont developed into an important religious and political center of medieval Lorraine.
Amatus probably would have found all that rather surprising.
He had originally gone into the mountains because he wanted to be left alone with God.
Instead, his life helped create a religious community, a town, and a tradition of prayer that survived for more than a thousand years.
Sometimes God has a funny way of using people who want obscurity.
Saint Amatus of Remiremont, hermit of the mountains and father of perpetual prayer, pray for us.
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