ST. BAIN, BISHOP OF TEROUANNE, (NOW ST OMER,) AND ABBOT OF ST. VANDRILLE’S

HE was fifth bishop of that see, to which he was promoted before the middle of the fifth century. Merville, where St. Mauront had built his monastery of Breüil, being in the diocese of Terouanne, St. Bain translated thence the body of St. Amatus, to the church which St. Mauront had lately built at Douay.1 When SS. Luglius and Luglianus, two Irish hermits, had been murdered by highwaymen in this diocese, St. Bain buried them with great honor in the chapel of his castle at Lilleres, where they are honored as patrons of the town on the 23d of October. Solitude, “which nourishes prayer as a mother does her child,” as St. John Damascen says, being always the ruling inclination of our saint, he resigned his bishopric, and retiring to the abbey of Fontenelle, or St. Vandrille’s in Normandy, put on the monastic habit, as he was already possessed perfectly of the spirit, and some time after was chosen the fifth abbot of that house from St. Wandrille, in 170. Out of his great devotion to the relics of the saints, he translated the bodies of St. Wandrille, Ansbert, and Wolfgran, or Wulfran, out of the chapel of St. Paul, built by St. Vandrille for the burial-place, into the great church of St. Peter, in which the monks celebrated the divine mysteries. Pepin, duke of the French, having founded or considerably augmented the abbey of Fleury, now called St. Bennet’s on the Loire, situated nine leagues above Orleans, he committed the same to the direction of St. Bain, in 706. The saint died about the year 711, and is honored on the 20th of June at St. Vandrille’s, and in the Gallican Martyrologies. See the Chronicle of Fontenelle, the essons for his festival, Papebroke, more exact than Mabillon whom he corrects, t. 4, Junij, p. 27.