SS. Bona, or Beuve, and Doda, Virgins and Abbesses


ST. BEUVE was of the royal blood of France, nearly related to King Dagobert, and one of the principal ladies of the court. She edified the whole kingdom by her virtues in the world above thirty years, but rejected all solicitations to marry, desiring to devote herself entirely to the service of God. Her brother, St. Baudry, or Balderic, who had some years before founded the monastery of Montfaucon, which he governed in quality of abbot, built a nunnery in honour of the Blessed Virgin, in the suburbs of Rheims, in 639: St. Beuve there took the religious habit, and, notwithstanding her tears and opposition, was chosen the first abbess of this house. By her example she conducted her religious sisters in the perfect spirit of humility, poverty, mortification, and prayer, and died in 673, leaving behind her a sweet odour of her sanctity and virtues to all France. She was succeeded by her niece, St. Doda, a faithful imitator of her spirit and virtues. The bodies of SS. Beuve and Doda were afterwards removed to St. Peter’s abbey, within the city. The ancient history of their lives having been lost in a great fire, an anonymous author compiled another from the tradition of the nuns in the tenth century; a piece not much esteemed, omitted by Mabillon, but published by the Bollandists, 24 Apr. See, on these holy virgins, Flodoard, the learned canon of Rheims, who died in 966, in his curious History of the Church of Rheims, l. 4, c. 38.	1