Le Mans carries St. Scholastica's body home on its own shoulders

LE MANS, Gaul, in these years, about 660 AD — The people of Le Mans lifted a body onto their own shoulders in these years and carried it home. It was the body their bishop’s men had gone to Italy to fetch and had brought back as Saint Scholastica’s, the sister of St. Benedict, dead more than a hundred years. St. Berarius, bishop of Le Mans, met them outside the city. He laid it behind the altar of a church he had built from the ground up to receive it, on the strip of level ground between the Roman wall and the river Sarthe.

St. Scholastica founded and governed a monastery of women a few miles from her brother’s at Monte Cassino. When she died, St. Benedict sent his monks to bring her body to his abbey. They buried her in the grave he had prepared for his own burial, and brother and sister lay in one tomb. The Lombards afterwards destroyed Monte Cassino, and for years the place where the bodies lay stood empty. Mummolus, abbot of Fleury on the Loire in the territory of Orléans, sent one of his monks, St. Aigulf, for the body of St. Benedict. Envoys of the bishop of Le Mans joined St. Aigulf on the road, sent for the body of St. Benedict’s sister. They took both bodies away by night. Brother and sister had been buried together, and the bones came out of the tomb mixed in one basket, so until somebody could separate them neither Fleury nor Le Mans had a saint to carry home.

At Bonnée in the Orléanais a blind man recovered his sight from the relics the party was carrying. Then the men of Le Mans claimed St. Scholastica’s remains, and the argument over the division started. It ended in a miracle. Adrevald of Fleury, who wrote the history of the journey, says God willed the brother and sister equal in the sign that told their bones apart. They had been born of one flesh at one and the same time, he writes, and were equal in merit.

With the doubt gone, the people of Le Mans turned to her body. They lifted it onto their shoulders at once and set off for home with immense joy. At the head of them walked one of the two men St. Berarius had sent to Rome and Benevento to settle the question of the relics; the other had died on the journey. Word of their coming ran ahead of them through the whole province as they carried her west from the Loire.

Le Mans is built up the slopes of a hill above the left bank of the Sarthe. Round the high ground runs the wall the Romans raised: a circuit of about three-quarters of a mile enclosing some twenty acres, twelve to fourteen feet thick, with towers set unevenly along it, twenty-seven to forty-four yards apart. It is built in bands — rough rubble faced with small dressed stone, then three, four or five courses of flat brick laid across it, then stone again. On the west side the wall comes down to the river, and posterns are pierced through it on that face. Between that face and the Sarthe lies a strip of level ground, outside the defences and under them. That is where the bishop had chosen to build.

St. Berarius came out of the city to meet the relic. With him were vested priests and clerics of every rank, crosses, censers and candlesticks, and all the banners of his churches. A crowd of both sexes and every age walked with them, singing together. He took the body from the men who had carried it and brought it in with litanies, hymns and psalms to the new house on the river ground. The church there was already dedicated to St. Peter.

St. Berarius endowed the monastery out of the revenues of his bishopric and out of his own property. He ruled that the house and everything belonging to it should be subject for ever to his see and to the mother church. It was to pass to his successors and to the priests and canons there. He provided what women living under religious rule would need. Within a short time a hundred and fifty noblewomen had left the world and gathered there.

In the second half of the ninth century the Northmen burned it. Priests were killed and the women in it were violated, and some of the townspeople carried the relics out of the fire. At the beginning of the tenth century, on November 4, Count Hugo had what was saved brought to the church of St. Peter in the city and laid in a good casket. What was left was carried later inside the citadel, into the apse of the collegiate church of St. Pierre la Cour. The counts of Maine used that church as their own chapel. Fire destroyed Le Mans on September 3, 1134 AD, and took the shrine with it, leaving a few burnt bones.

The city kept two feasts of her all the same: February 10 for her death, and July 11 for her coming into Gaul. Nobody worked on either day, and on the July feast her body was carried through Le Mans again, past street walls hung with tapestries. On November 23, 1876 AD, she was proclaimed patroness of the city.