HE was a noble Briton, a native of Cornwall, cousin of St. Samson, and
his fellow-disciple under St. Iltutus. We need no other proof of his
wonderful fervor and progress in virtue, and all the exercises of a
monastic life, than the testimony of St. Iltutus, by whose advice St.
Paul left the monastery to embrace more perfect eremetical life in a
retired place in the same country. Some time after, our saint sailing
from Cornwall, passed into Armorica, and continued the same austere
eremitical life in a small island on the coast of the Osismians, a
barbarous idolatrous people in Armorica, or Little Britain. Prayer and
contemplation were his whole employment, and bread and water his only
food, except on great festivals, on which he took {582} with his bread a
few little fish. The saint, commiserating the blindness of the pagan
inhabitants on the coast, passed over to the continent, and instructed
them in the faith. Withur, count or governor of Bas, and all that coast,
seconded by king Childebert, procured his ordination to the episcopal
dignity, notwithstanding his tears to prevent it. Count Withur, who
resided in the Isle of Bas, bestowed his own house on the saint to be
converted into a monastery; and St. Paul placed in it certain fervent
monks, who had accompanied him from Wales and Cornwall. He was himself
entirely taken up in his pastoral functions, and his diligence in
acquitting himself of every branch of his obligations was equal to his
apprehension of their weight. When he had completed the conversion of
that country, he resigned his bishopric to a disciple, and retired into
the isle of Bas, where he died in holy solitude, on the 12th of March,
about the year 573, near one hundred years old.[1] During the inroads of
the Normans, his relics were removed to the abbey of Fleury, or St.
Bennet's on the Loire, but were lost when the Calvinists plundered that
church. Leon, the ancient city of the Osismians, in which he fixed his
see, takes his name. His festival occurs in the ancient breviary of
Leon, on the 10th of October, perhaps the day of the translation of his
relics. For in the ancient breviary of Nantes, and most others, he is
honored on the 12th of March. See Le Cointe's Annals, the Bollandists on
this day, and Lobineau in the Lives of the Saints of Brittany, from his
acts compiled by a monk of Fleury, about the close of the tenth century.
Footnotes:
1. St. Paul was ordained priest before he left Great Britain, about the
year 530. The little island on the coast of Armorica, where he chose
his first abode in France, was called Medonia, and seems to the
present Molene, situated between the isle of Ushant and the coast.
The first oratory which he built on the continent, very near this
islands seems to be the church called from him Lan-Pol.