Saint of the Day – 1 March – St Siviard (Died 687) Priest and the 5th Abbot of the Moinastery of Saint-Calais in Maine, France, Author, a man of great humility and leadership skills. Also known as – Siard, Siviardus, Siviardo.
The Roman Martyrology reads today: “At Le Mans, St Siviard, Abbot.”
Siviard’s biographer, Jean-Barthélemy Hauréau, was one of his contemporaries, a 7th-century Monk.
According to the narrator, he had known the holy Abbot ,not only in the Monastery, where he had had him as his father but during his childhood and, therefore, in his native village.
Siviard’s father was Sigiram, a Frankish noble and his mother was Adda. Since Bertrand du Mans, the Bishop of Le Mans, had donated lands to his beloved nephew Sigiram in the Diablintic region. It is assumed that Sigiram was himself a Cleric and Abbot.
In Siviard’s life, he tells us only of his childhood passion for study, his vocation to religious life, where he wished to be buried among the most obscure Monks, the choice of his superiors who elevated him to the Priesthood, the virtues he practiced, worthy of all the praise that Scripture bestows on the holy ministers of the Lord and his eventual election to the Abbatial chair after his father’s death.
King Thierry III, who named Siviard, confirmed his possession of the Monastery’s property in 676. Siviard built the house of God magnificently, both in material structure and spiritual discipline. Siviard received the places of Villiers and Lantion from Bishop Aigilbert and built a villa and probably a small Monastery on the grounds of Saint-Georges-de-la-Coué.
St Siviard died without sadness, without regret, on the first day of March 687. One of the Monks was warned of this death, by a vision in which the Abbot was shown to him in celestial light accompanied by Saints Peter and Paul and recommended that he carry to his sister the Eulogies he had prepared.
A diploma of Charlemagne from 774 expressly states that Siviard’s body rests in the villa of Savonnières in Saint-Georges-db-la-Coué, the last foundation of the holy Abbot. It was here that his bones were removed and then transported to Sens during the Norman invasions. The Church of Laval has occupied a significant part of the site since 1883.
At the behest of several Bishops, Siviard wrote the life of Saint Calais, founder of the Abbey he had governed.
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