Saint Eucherius of Orléans

Eucherius was born at Orléans. ⁵⁶ The santoral of the Archdiocese of Madrid says he came of a noble family and dates his birth to about 690; katolsk.no, the Norwegian bishops' saints database, puts it about 694. ¹⁵ Madrid repeats an old story that his mother dreamed before his birth that an angel told her she would bear a holy bishop, and observes drily that there was a time when a saint's life seemed to need noble titles and wonders to hold a reader's interest. ⁵

He studied the arts and sciences of his day and cared most for theology, Madrid says, and entered the clergy under a bishop it names as Leodobert. ⁵ Then he became a monk at Jumièges, an abbey on the Seine near Rouen known for strict observance, where he added the study of the canons and the Fathers to the prayer and penance of the house and was ordained priest. ⁵ EWTN dates his profession to about 714. ⁶ katolsk.no says he spent seven years there, valued by his brethren and growing humbler the more they admired him. ¹

When the bishop of Orléans died, the city looked to Jumièges. katolsk.no calls the dead bishop Eucherius's uncle, Soavaric, and says the Life records that the senate, people and clergy of Orléans sent a delegation to Charles Martel, mayor of the palace and real ruler of the Franks, for leave to elect him; Charles agreed. ¹ It notes, too, that the lists of the bishops of Orléans show two or three names between Soavaric and Eucherius. ¹ Madrid names the predecessor as Severus, and says that Charles all but forced Eucherius to accept. ⁵

Eucherius did try to escape the honor. katolsk.no says he begged his brethren to help him, fearing that the glory of the world would cost him the salvation he hoped to win among them, and that in the end he gave way and left Jumièges in tears. ¹ He was twenty-five, and the year, by katolsk.no's reckoning, was 719, though some sources say 721. ¹⁶ Goyau, in the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia, gives his episcopate as 717 to 743. ³

Madrid says he governed with unusual zeal, beginning with the discipline of his clergy in the belief that good example is the first preaching, and that the reform of morals and piety that followed reached the remotest parts of the diocese. ⁵

Charles Martel spent his rule at war. Godefroid Kurth, in the encyclopedia's article on him, says that his reign "would have been an impossibility" had he not found a way to reward his followers, and that he did it by giving them "the usufruct of a great many ecclesiastical lands," the spoliation remembered as "the secularization by Charles Martel." ⁴ Kurth calls it "an expedient that could be excused without, however, being justified," and notes that the Church remained the legal owner of the lands. ⁴ katolsk.no adds that Charles also made laymen from among his officers abbots and bishops, who put their churches' property at his disposal, and that he did not act from any hostility to religion; he believed his victories had been won with Christ's help. ¹

Eucherius resisted the confiscations with all his strength, katolsk.no says. ¹ Goyau is more specific: he "protested against the depredations of Waifre, a companion of Charles Martel." ³ EWTN says he began protesting as soon as he became bishop. ⁶ The Martyrology tells it differently, saying he was driven into exile because of the slanders of envious men; Madrid combines the two, saying the envious turned Charles against the bishop who had dared to defend the goods of the Church. ²⁵

In 737, katolsk.no says, Charles was returning from a campaign in Aquitaine and stopped at Orléans. ¹ He ordered Eucherius to follow him to Verneuil on the Oise, where his court then was, and there banished him and all his family to Cologne. ¹ Some sources date the exile to 732. ¹

At Cologne the people soon came to admire him, katolsk.no says, and Charles, afraid that his influence would grow, moved him to a fortress in the Hesbaye near Liège. ¹³ It happened again there. The commander of the fortress, a man named Robert, at last allowed him to withdraw to the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Trond, near Maastricht, where he would be cut off from the people. ¹ EWTN says he was apparently never reconciled with Charles. ⁶

He spent his last six years at Saint-Trond, Madrid says, in hidden holiness, and died there on February 20, 743. ⁵ The Martyrology records his death in that monastery, where, it says, he had found a devout refuge among the monks. ²

A cult had grown up by the ninth century at the latest, katolsk.no says, and his relics are kept at Saint-Trond. ¹ It thinks his Life was written in his own time. ¹ His fame there seems also to have put his name, by mistake, on the list of the bishops of Maastricht, where he appears as its eighth bishop. ¹ He is shown being driven out of Orléans, or raising a dead man. ¹

A story told after his death attached him to the man who exiled him. Kurth says that in the ninth century Hincmar of Reims "related the story of the vision with which St. Eucher was said to have been favoured and which showed Charles in hell, to which he had been condemned for robbing the Church of its property." ⁴ katolsk.no gives the details as Hincmar told them to a council at Quierzy in 858: Eucherius, at prayer, was taken up and shown the sufferings of the damned, and saw Charles among them. ¹ He then sent Boniface and Abbot Fulrad of Saint-Denis to Charles's tomb; when they opened it a dragon rushed out, and the inside was blackened as if burned. ¹ katolsk.no is plain that this legend does not come from the original Life. ¹

None of the sources consulted names a patronage for Saint Eucherius of Orléans. He is remembered as the bishop exiled for defending the property of the Church, and katolsk.no notes that he is called after the three places of his life: Orléans, Jumièges and Sint-Truiden. ¹³

Saint Eucherius's feast day is February 20, the day of his death. ¹² The current Roman Martyrology keeps him on that day, commemorating his death at Sint-Truiden in Brabant, in present-day Belgium. ² katolsk.no adds that he also has a feast of the translation of his relics on August 11, or by some reckonings August 12. ¹

Eucherius did not want to be a bishop. He asked his brothers at Jumièges to help him get out of it, and he left the monastery in tears. ¹ He was young, and he had good reason to be wary: the man whose consent made him bishop was the same man who later sent him away. ¹

What he defended was not his own. The lands Charles took belonged to churches and monasteries, and the Church remained their owner even while others lived off them. ¹⁴ Eucherius said so to the most powerful man in Francia, and lost his see for it. ¹³

His exile kept shrinking. Cologne was a city, then came a fortress, then a monastery where he was cut off from the people. ¹ At each stop people came to admire him, and at the last of them he lived quietly among monks again, which is where he had wanted to be from the start. ¹⁵

He was never, so far as the sources say, reconciled with Charles. ⁶ The story of Charles in hell came a century later, from other hands; the Life, which katolsk.no thinks was written in his own time, does not tell it. ¹⁴