Saint Aubert

Aubert became bishop of Avranches, in western Normandy, during the reign of the Frankish king Childebert III, between 695 and 711. Avranches had been the city of the Gallic Abrincates and then a Gallo-Roman capital. Off the coast of the diocese, at the mouth of the Couesnon, where the tides made the approach dangerous, rose a rocky island then called Mont Tombe.

According to the tradition of the Mount, the archangel Michael appeared to Aubert in his sleep in 708 and ordered him to build an oratory on the rock. The bishop took the vision for a bad dream, feared that it came from the devil, and hesitated. At the third appearance the archangel pressed his finger on Aubert’s head so hard that he left a dent in the skull, and the bishop set to work.

The church was dedicated on October 16, 709, and Aubert placed canons there to serve it. He died about 720 and, by tradition, was buried in the sanctuary he had founded. About 966 Duke Richard I of Normandy replaced the canons with Benedictine monks, and the abbey grew into one of the great pilgrimages of the West.

Further reading: Mont-Saint-Michel: A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Archangel’s Mount.

The skull venerated as Aubert’s, pierced by a hole that the tradition explains by the archangel’s finger, is kept in the basilica of Saint-Gervais in Avranches, in a reliquary of crystal, silver gilt and lapis lazuli made in 1895. Some skeptics read the hole as the trace of a trepanation, a surgical opening of the skull. His feast is September 10.

The sanctuary he founded drew pilgrims from far away, and kings of France, among them Saint Louis, Philip the Fair, Charles VI and Louis XI, came there to pray. The Revolution closed the abbey and turned it into a prison, which was shut in 1863, and a small monastic community returned within the walls in 1966, for the thousandth anniversary of the abbey. Since June 24, 2001, the Monastic Fraternities of Jerusalem have kept the prayer of the abbey (the brothers are due to leave in the summer of 2027, the sisters to stay), with Lauds in the morning, a sung Mass at noon from Tuesday to Saturday and Vespers in the late afternoon; there are no services on Sunday evening or on Monday, their day of solitude. The parish church of Saint-Pierre in the village has Mass every day, and a small chapel at the foot of the rock is dedicated to the founder.

The usual image of Aubert shows the bishop asleep while the archangel touches his head, the scene of the third apparition. The reliquary of 1895 at Saint-Gervais shows the skull itself under crystal. In Avranches the Scriptorial, a museum of the history of Mont-Saint-Michel, displays manuscripts of the eighth to the fifteenth century from the abbey and changes the selection every three months.

• AvranchesThe basilica of Saint-Gervais, whose treasury keeps the skull of Saint Aubert in its reliquary of crystal, silver gilt and lapis lazuli made in 1895.
• Mont-Saint-MichelThe abbey on the rock where he founded the first sanctuary, with the Office of the Monastic Fraternities of Jerusalem from Tuesday to Sunday and the small chapel of Saint-Aubert at the foot of the rock.

On our ways: Mont-Saint-Michel, Avranches.

• Via ArchangeliThe Archangel’s Way, six daysDay IV, Coutances to Avranches
  Day V, Avranches to Mont-Saint-Michel, across the bay