Suggest an Edit — Severinus

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Biography

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Saint Severinus of Noricum was a fifth-century monk and missionary active on the Danube frontier of the failing Western Roman Empire. Almost everything known about him comes from the Vita Sancti Severini, written around 511 by his disciple Eugippius, who had belonged to Severinus's monastic community and later governed the Italian monastery that guarded the saint's tomb. Eugippius records that Severinus would not reveal his native country or parentage. Later writers have inferred from his Latin culture and from a possible earlier stay in the East that he was a Roman of respectable birth, perhaps from Italy or Africa, but those remain inferences rather than documented facts.

He appeared in the province of Noricum Ripense in the decades after the mid-fifth century, when Hunnic power had receded and Rugian and other Germanic groups controlled much of the countryside. There he lived first as a hermit and then as abbot of small monasteries, especially at Favianis, generally identified with Mautern an der Donau in present-day Lower Austria, and at Boiotro near Passau. He preached repentance, organized food for the hungry and ransom for captives, and warned Roman communities such as Quintanis, Batavis, and Lauriacum of coming attacks. The Vita attributes to him prophecy and miracles; historically he can be seen as a Latin ascetic who held together remnants of provincial Christian life and who negotiated with barbarian courts.

The Rugian king Flaccitheus sought his advice, and Severinus later dealt with Flaccitheus's son Feletheus, also called Feva, and with Feletheus's queen Giso, whom the Vita criticizes for cruelty to Roman prisoners. Severinus refused to become a bishop and remained a monk. His communities practiced common prayer, fasting, and care of the poor. They belonged to no later named religious order; Benedict of Nursia was only an infant at the time of Severinus's death.

Severinus died at Favianis on 8 January 482. In 488, when Odoacer compelled the remaining Roman population to leave Noricum, the monks carried his body into Italy and eventually settled at Castellum Lucullanum on the Bay of Naples. A monastery formed around the relics. In the tenth century the body was moved into Naples for safety from Saracen raids and was later kept at the monastery of Santi Severino e Sossio. After that house was suppressed in the early nineteenth century, the relics were transferred to the collegiate church of San Sossio in Frattamaggiore, near Naples. The Church commemorates him on 8 January. He is honored as apostle of Noricum and as a patron of Austria, Bavaria, Linz, and the town of San Severo in Apulia.

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