United States or Ecuador ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


"In legend he is associated with Saint Simon; according to the Breviary, he is said to have evangelized Mesopotamia and to have suffered martyrdom with his companion Saint in Persia. The Bollandists, on the other hand, assert that he was the Apostle to Arabia and Idumea, while the Greek Menology relates that he was shot to death with arrows by the infidels in Armenia.

In addition to this, powerful learned societies employ experts to pass from one depository to another cataloguing the documents there, in order to pick out all the documents of a particular class, or relating to a special subject: thus the society of Bollandists caused a general catalogue of hagiographical documents to be prepared by its emissaries, and the Imperial Academy of Vienna catalogued in a similar manner the monuments of patristic literature.

The labours of the Bollandists, not only in searching through all available literature, but in a special correspondence established with their Jesuit brethren throughout the world, are absolutely astounding.

It may be necessary to add the Acts which have been translated into Latin by Colgan or the Bollandists do not of course rank as Latin Lives. Whether the Latin Lives proper are free translations of the Irish Lives or the Irish Lives translations of Latin originals remains still, to a large extent, an open question. His reasoning here however leaves one rather unconvinced.

In reality he had ceased to care for anything but the Cathedral; it had taken possession of him. And besides, the lives of the Saints as they were written by the inferior Bollandists were enough to disgust anybody with saintliness.

The Bollandists obtained their information from the spot, and it is on the spot that this kind of literature must be worked out. A thoroughly accomplished antiquary, working within a limited district, will thus bring forth more full and satisfactory results, so far as they go, than even the Bollandists have achieved, and hence the great value of the services of the book clubs to hagiology.

Everybody knows, or ought to know, that the great library of this kind of literature, published by the Bollandists, begins with the beginning of the year, and gives the life of each saint successively according to his day in the calendar.

And as a phenomenon, let us not deceive ourselves on the magnitude of the Christian hagiology. The Bollandists were restricted on many sides. They took only what was in Latin while every country in Europe had its own home growth in its own language and thus many of the most characteristic of the lives are not to be found at all in their collection.

You are not ignorant, I suppose, of the exploits in which Satan indulged against that saint?" "Indeed, I am, Monsieur l'Abbé." "Then I may tell you that the narrative of these assaults has been preserved by the Bollandists, who have included the life of this pious woman in their biographies. It was written by Peter of Dacia, a Dominican, and her confessor.

See ch. xviii. section 10. In the second Report of the Rota, p. 477 quoted by Benedict XIV., De Canoniz. iii. 26, n. 12, and by the Bollandists in the Acta, 1315 we have these words, and they throw great light on the text: "Sunt et alli testes de visu affirmantes quod quando beata Teresa scribebat libros, facies ejus resplendebat."