Audomar was born about the year 595 or 600 at Orval, near Coutances in the Cotentin, then part of the Frankish kingdom of Neustria. His father was named Friulphus and his mother Domitta, whom Butler's tradition calls Domitilla. He was their only son, raised among the Gallo-Frankish nobility of the region, and he grew up knowing the tongue and customs of the Saxons who had settled in Normandy since the sixth century — a knowledge that God would later turn to the service of the Gospel.
When his mother died, father and son together renounced the world. About the year 615 they entered Luxeuil in the diocese of Besançon, the great missionary abbey founded by the Irish monk Saint Columbanus, then governed by Abbot Eustasius. Under that rule Audomar learned the discipline of Irish monastic penance and the Roman order of prayer, and above all he steeped himself in the Sacred Scriptures, in which he acquired a proficiency his contemporaries thought remarkable. Luxeuil in those years was forming a whole generation of bishops for the Frankish Church, and Audomar took his place among them.
The country of the Morini, whose capital was Thérouanne, had received the faith long before from missionaries such as Fuscian and Victoricus, but invasions and neglect had left scarcely a vestige of Christianity there; the coastal districts had become Saxon and pagan again. King Dagobert I, whose policy it was to re-Christianize the north of Gaul, was told of Audomar by Bishop Acharius of Noyon and Tournai, and named him bishop of Thérouanne. He was consecrated about 637 and reached his see shortly before 639. Tradition also records that it was Audomar who ordained Saint Wandrille to the priesthood.
He was a missionary before he was an administrator. He resided in his diocese, celebrated the great feasts among his people, and preached tirelessly, gathering around him disciples, catechumens, missionaries and men and women of influence. Rather than despise the local nobility, he converted them and set them to work: at the mouth of the Aa he was received by a wealthy landowner named Adroald, whom he brought to Christ. About 649 or 651 Adroald gave him twelve estates along the river, including the hill of Sithiu. Audomar asked Luxeuil for helpers, and there came to him Mommolin, whose knowledge of the local language fitted him for preaching, Bertin, and Ebertram; he sent them into the marshlands north of his episcopal city.
On that ground rose his greatest work. He erected the church of Our Lady of Sithiu about 649, with a small monastery beside it, and the monks built the church of Saint Peter to the east — the abbey that would afterwards be called Saint-Bertin, and which soon rivalled old Luxeuil for the number of learned and zealous men trained within it. Mommolin governed it until about 660, when he was called to succeed Saint Eligius as bishop of Noyon, and Bertin, who came from Audomar's own country, became abbot in his place. The bishop gave his monks what a lesser man would have kept: in 662 he obtained and promulgated a charter of privileges for Sithiu, freeing the monastery's goods from episcopal disposal and its monks from his own disciplinary authority, and he took part in further charters in 664 and 667. He handed over the church of Our Lady to the monks on the single condition that he should be buried there and that it should serve as the burial place of the community.
In his last years Audomar lost his sight. Blind, he still signed the charters that secured his monks' freedom, and blind he was led about his diocese; a window in the church of Saint-Nicolas-en-Cité at Arras shows Saint Aubert guiding the blind Saint Omer as he presides at the translation of the relics of Saint Vaast in 668. He died on a first of November, in a year given variously between 667 and 670 — at Wavrans-sur-l'Aa, according to one tradition, or in the monastery of Sithiu itself. As he had wished, Bertin had his body carried to the church of Our Lady at Sithiu.
His cult began at once. Abbot Bertin named the monastery after its founder, and the settlement that grew around it is the city of Saint-Omer to this day. From Carolingian times his name stood in all the martyrologies, and soon after the year 800 his feast was moved from his death-day to 9 September. A Life of Saint Omer was composed early in the ninth century by a local cleric out of oral tradition, and it recounts many miracles; later recensions were written at Corbie and elsewhere, and manuscripts survive at Saint Petersburg, Brussels, Saint-Omer and Lille, along with four psalters at Saint-Omer containing his office. His relics were solemnly visited in 1052, 1269, 1324 and 1469, and were contested for centuries between the chapter of Our Lady and the abbey of Saint-Bertin. During the French Revolution his shrine was carried to Paris, the reliquary melted down and the relics destroyed; only the thirteenth-century cenotaph in the cathedral of Saint-Omer remains. He is honoured in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches alike, and many towns and churches in France, Flanders and beyond bear his name. Because of his blindness he is invoked for troubles of the eyes and of the sight, and at Orval, his birthplace, for ailments of the bowels. Artists show him in bishop's vestments with a bunch of grapes, a crozier and a book.
May Saint Audomar obtain for us the light he lost and never mourned — the grace to see God's will and to serve it — and let us imitate today his generous trust in others, giving away authority and honour so that the work of Christ may grow.
