Everything about Saint Fiacre totally explained
Saint Fiacre (; ;,, ) was born in
Ireland in the
seventh century. is an ancient pre-Christian name from Ireland. The meaning is uncertain, but the name may mean "battle king", or it may be a derivative of the word "raven". The name can be found in ancient Irish folklore and stories such as the
Children of Lir.
He was better known in
France, where he built a
hospice for travellers in what is now
Saint-Fiacre, Seine-et-Marne.
Fiacre lived in a
hermitage in
County Kilkenny. His unwanted fame as one skilled with herbs, a healer and holy man, caused
disciples to flock to him. Seeking greater solitude, he left his native land and sought refuge in France, at
Meaux. Here Fiacre built an
oratory in honour of the
Virgin Mary, a hospice in which he received strangers, and a cell in which he himself lived apart. He lived a life of great
mortification, in prayer, fast, vigil, and the manual labour of the garden.
He approached
St Faro, the Bishop of Meaux, to whom he made known his desire to live a life of solitude in the forest. St Faro assigned him a spot called Prodilus (Brodoluim), the modern Breuil, in the province of
Brie.
Legends
The legend of Fiacre goes that St Faro allowed him as much land as he might entrench in one day with a
furrow; Fiacre turned up the earth with the point of his staff, toppling trees and uprooting briers and weeds. A suspicious woman hastened to tell Faro that he was being beguiled and that this was
witchcraft. Faro, however, recognized that this was the work of God. From this point on it's said St Fiacre barred women, on pain of severe bodily infirmity, from the precincts of his monastery.
Veneration
His
relics are installed in
Meaux Cathedral. His feast day is under debate; in Ireland it's
1 September; elsewhere it's variously
18 August,
August 1, or
August 30, with
August 11 growing in acceptance as an official compromise.
St Fiacre is most renowned as the
patron saint of growing food and medicinal plants, sometimes more broadly referred to as simply gardening.
His reputed aversion to women is believed to be the reason he's known as the patron saint of venereal disease sufferers.
Saint Fiacre is also sometimes invoked to help heal people of ills. This isn't his patronage (as bestowed by the Vatican), but rather a common invocation based on his reputed skill with medicinal plants.
Fiacre (carriage)
Saint Fiacre is also the patron saint of
taxi drivers. The connection arose from the fact that the Hotel de Saint Fiacre in
Paris, France, rented
carriages. People who had no idea who Fiacre was referred to the small
hackney coaches as "Fiacre cabs", and eventually as "fiacres".
Similarly,
Viennese horse-drawn buggies are referred to as .
Further Information
Get more info on 'Saint Fiacre'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://fiacre.totallyexplained.com">Fiacre Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
