Lives of the Saints, June 25, Saint William, Saint Prosper

June 25

Spiritual Bouquet: The Son of man has not come to be served but to serve. St. Matthew 20:28

SAINT WILLIAM of VERCELLI
Abbot, Founder of the Congregation of Monte-Vergine
(†1142)

Saint William of Monte Vergine, born in Vercelli, a city of Lombardy, lost his father and mother in his infancy and was brought up by a relative in great sentiments of piety. At fifteen years of age, having an earnest desire to lead a penitential life, he left his native region and made a long and austere pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin founded by Saint James at Saragossa. He would have made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but God made known to him that he was calling him to a solitary life, and he retired into the kingdom of Naples. There he chose for his abode an uninhabited mountain, and lived in perpetual contemplation and the exercises of rigorous penitential austerities.

After a miracle of healing wrought by his prayers, he was discovered and his contemplation interrupted, so he decided to move to another mountain, where he built a very beautiful church in honor of Our Lady. With several former secular priests who joined him there, in 1119 he began the establishment of the Congregation of Monte Vergine, or Mount of the Virgin. This site is between Nola and Benevento in the same kingdom of Naples. These sons of Our Lady lived in great austerity. Seeing the progress in holiness of the good religious being formed there, the devil sowed division and criticism; but God drew good from the evil when Saint William went elsewhere and founded several more monasteries, both for men and women, in various places in the kingdom of Naples. He assisted the king of Naples, who greatly venerated him, to practice all the Christian virtues of a worthy sovereign, and the king in gratitude had a house of the Order built at Salerno opposite his palace, to have him near him more often.

When Saint William died on the 25^th of June, 1142, he had not yet written a Rule for his religious; his second successor, Robert, fearing the dissolution of a community without constitutions, placed them under that of Saint Benedict, and is regarded as the first abbot of the Benedictine Congregation of Monte-Vergine. A portrait of the Virgin venerated there has been an unfailing source of holy compunction; pilgrims continue to visit it.

Sources: Les Petits Bollandistes: Vies des Saints, by Msgr. Paul Guérin (Bloud et Barral: Paris, 1882), Vol. 7; Little Pictorial Lives of the Saints, a compilation based on Butler’s Lives of the Saints, and other sources by John Gilmary Shea (Benziger Brothers: New York, 1894).

SAINT PROSPER of AQUITAINE
Doctor of the Church
(†5^th century)

Saint Prosper was born in the Roman province of Aquitaine in the year 403. He is known chiefly through his writings, which reveal that in his youth he had applied himself to all branches both of sacred and secular learning. Because of the purity and sanctity of his manners, the writers of his time testify that he was a holy and venerable man. By his labors in France against the semi-Pelagian heretics, he was a strong collaborator of Saint Augustine in Africa. He was in correspondence with the African doctor, who wrote two of his works to refute and give light to the semi-Pelagians: On the predestination of the Saints and On the gift of perseverance. The enemies of Saint Augustine turned against Saint Prosper also, publishing “fifteen errors” which they attributed to the latter, then sixteen propositions supposedly clarifying Augustine’s true sentiments, and spread them widely. The Saint with gentleness answered all these writings without acrid reprisals.

Saint Prosper, insofar as is known, was not an ecclesiastic; but being of great virtue and possessing extraordinary talents and learning, he dealt with delicate questions with remarkable insight. Saint Leo the Great, when chosen Pope in 440, invited him to Rome, made him his secretary, and employed him in the most important affairs of the Church. It was primarily Saint Prosper who finally crushed the Pelagian heresy definitively, when it was raising its head in the see of Peter. Its complete overthrow is said to be due to his zeal, learning, and unwearied endeavors. The date of his death remains uncertain, but he was still living in 455, the date at which his Chronicle concludes.