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HOME / SAINT COLUMBAN
According to his biographer Jonas, Saint Columbanus (San Colombano) was born in 540 in the shadow of Mount Leinster, in the south of Ireland. He traveled north and studied as a monk on an island in Upper Lough Erne before settling in Bangor Abbey under the leadership of Abbot Comgall. In 590, he left Bangor with twelve companions and crossed the sea to land in Europe. Columban traveled through much of France, spending 20 years as abbot of the three monasteries he founded Annegray, Luxeuil, and Fontaine among the woods of. Banished by Queen Brunechilde, he crossed back into France and then went up the Rhine River to present-day Switzerland and Austria. Here, comrade Gallo settled in the village of Arbon on the shores of Lake Constance before moving further inland, where he established the large monastery from which the city of St. Gallen took its name. San Colombano, now seventy years old, crossed the Alps to Milan before reaching Bobbio, where he founded his last monastery, dying here on 23 November 615.
Columbanus is an exemplary figure of Irish monasticism, distinguished from Benedictine monasticism. Which favors stability, that is the monk’s loyalty to the same place and community. A peculiar characteristic of Irish monasticism is the Irish vocation to the (peregrination) “peregrinatio pro Christo” (or pro Domino): the vocation that is to the pilgrimage beyond the sea, understood as the definitive abandonment of one’s land and one’s people, that is, the definitive expatriation, which entails essentially a voluntary exile in the name of faith and, therefore, the choice of live forever without a homeland, like foreigners everywhere, as we are always on our way towards a true homeland that is not of this world; an extreme choice, of great renunciation, not surprisingly considered as the “white martyrdom”: a martyrdom indeed, even if not accompanied by the shedding of blood. We thus understand why Saint Columba also desired and realized in his life the experience of the peregrinatio, thus completing a long journey across a large part of the European continent.
Columbanus was a holy pilgrim, a great pilgrim; it was first and foremost having traveled mostly 5,000 kilometers on foot, but it was no less so in his disposition of spirit and interior attitude. Colombano intended to realize in his life, taking it to its extreme consequences, that idea dear to Christian thought, which sees life as a journey or a pilgrimage on this earth to reach the true homeland, which is not of this world. It is an idea that he promptly expresses, often returning to it in his writings: “Wayfarers always ardently desire the end of their journey, so we too, who are wayfarers and pilgrims in this world, must think incessantly about the goal of the journey, that is, of our life: the end of our journey is our homeland.” Hence another recurring idea, that of the transience of earthly life, of its brevity and fleetingness, on which Colombano uses a simile that testifies to his way of thinking as a true pilgrim: human life is short – he observes – “like a journey of a single day,” i.e., like a day’s journey: which is precisely the unit of measurement – time and space – usually used by faithful pilgrims.
