Saint Achaire

Nothing was as dear to the Saint as the solitude of Lux solitude de Luxeuil Monastery where Acharius was trained. euil; he only left it to exercise, among the neighboring populations, a ministry of charity, peace, and salvation. In his humility, Achaire wished to live unknown to men, and to await in silence, prayer, and mortification, the great day of eternity; but God did not permit such a brilliant light to remain hidden under a bushel: He called him to illuminate the Church with his beneficent rays. Betrayed by the reputation of his virtues, Achaire was raised against his will to the episcopate, and placed at the head of the vast di ocese of Noyon a diocèse de Noyon The saint's principal episcopal see. nd Tour nai. At Tournai City associated with the Diocese of Noyon. the same time, as if the administration of two important Churches were not enough for his active solicitude, Clot aire II cal Clotaire II King of Neustria and later sole King of the Franks, protector of Columbanus after his exile. led him into his councils. The Blessed one used the influence that the holiness of his life gave him over the mind of the king and the nobles for the prosperity of the State, and above all for the extension of the kingdom of Jesus Christ. This divine Master was still unknown in several parts of the diocese of Tournai, where the demon had succeeded in maintaining the worship of idols.

Achaire, unable to provide for the spiritual needs of such a numerous flock by himself, had recourse to the apostolic zeal of Saint Amand, w hom his ent saint Amand Spiritual advisor to Gertrude. reaties, joined with those of Saint Ouen and Saint Eloi, had just reconciled with Dagobert I: he therefore charged him to go and evangelize these regions. While Amand worked to dispel superstitious practices at the breath of the evangelical word, Achaire devoted all his care to the diocese of Noyon. He made himself humble and small to instruct and win the inhabitants of the countryside to the Savior; he appeared above all in the midst of the poor and the afflicted, whose needs he delighted in relieving and whose sufferings he calmed; sinners never heard him without being moved, and he was fortunate enough to convert a great number of them. Considering monasteries as a refuge against the dangers of the world, an asylum for piety, virtue, and science, a place of expiation where prayer and holy austerities disarm divine justice, he built several of them, as much through his own liberality as with the alms of the faithful.

Achaire's solicitude for his flock did not make him a stranger to the general needs of the Church; he sat at the council held in Reims in 630, with concile tenu à Reims, en 630 Ecclesiastical assembly addressing discipline and simony. Marin of Beauvais, Agomare of Senlis, and about forty other prelates. He worked, in concert with his venerable colleagues, to root out the abuses and errors of the time, to restore discipline, to cause simony to disappear, and to erase the evils caused by civil discord.

Acharius loved to make known to his children the virtues, the glory, and the power of the Lord's elect: as, in his diocese, several miracles had occurred at the tomb of a humble servant of God, called Momble, he solemnly had the body of the Blessed one, which had been preserved from corruption, raised from the earth, and inscribed his name in the catalogue of Saints. By these acts, and so many others like them that we cannot report here, having as it were prepared the way for the illustri ous Saint saint Eloi Founder of the monastery and spiritual advisor to Saint Aurea. Eligius, who was to succeed him on the see of Noyon, he ended his mortal career on November 27 of the year 639, at the age of seventy, and went to receive in heaven the reward for his labors. He was buried in the church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, called today Sainte-Godeberte, near Noyon. Saints of Beauvais, by M. the Abbé Sabatier.