Sunday, November 20, 2005

"Saint Exupery" mystery solved! (I think)

Well, in my quest to find out which saint Antoine de Saint-Exupery is named after, I think I made a breakthrough. Instead of typing "Saint Exupery" into Google, which produced nothing but the author, I typed "Saint Exuperius", and got an index of patron saints. This generated three possiblilities:

1. The aforementioned Saint Exuperius, one of the Martyrs of the Theban Legion, who died in 287 CE at Aaunum, an area of modern Switzerland.

2. Saint Exuperantius, a deacon who was martyred in Spoleto, Italy in 303 CE.

3. The most likely, I think - Saint Exuperance, also known as Exuerantia of Troyes, a nun who died of natural causes in 380 CE and whose relics are venerated in Troyes. It would make sense that a French family would be named after a French saint.

And yes, there are quite a few saints who are patrons of music or musicians besides Cecilia and Gregory (although not specifically opera or any other genre of music); I should also note that Julian the Hospitaller (whom I've actually heard of) is the patron saint of wandering musicians and minstrels, among many other things.. I've posted links if you're interested.

Note that there are thousands of saints listed on this site, and every conceivable topic of patronage. As I said before, I think the Church "decanonized" some of them because there were just too many to handle, so I hope these are still official saints, and that Catholic readers correct me if I'm wrong about any of this!

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