St. Aurea, Virgin and Abbess


WHEN St. Eligius, by the liberality of King Dagobert, settled at Paris a nunnery of three hundred virgins, he appointed Aurea abbess of that numerous family. She walked before them in the exercises of religious perfection, and, in the thirty-fourth year of her abbatial dignity, being invited to glory by St. Eligius in a vision after his death, she exhorted her sisters to rejoice at the near prospect of their bliss, and died on the 4th of October in 666. With her one hundred and sixty of her nuns were swept off by the pestilence. Her nunnery was called St. Eligius’s and St. Aurea’s. As it stood within the city she could not be buried at it, and St. Eligius had built the church of St. Paul, then without the city, for a cemetery for her community. She was therefore interred at St. Paul’s, and some time after, her bones were taken up, and kept in a rich shrine in that church, till they were translated into her monastery. This nunnery being fallen to decay, it was united to the episcopal see of Paris in the twelfth century, and the bishop placed in it Benedictin monks. Four hundred years after, the first archbishop, John Francis de Gondi, settled in that church the Regular Clerks called Barnobites, in 1636. Her relics have been in some former ages in equal veneration at Paris with those of St. Genevieve. See the life of St. Eligius on the 1st of December, and the Roman and Paris Martyrologies. Also Felibien et Lobineau, Hist. de Paris.	1