Of Saint Mary — Marius in Latin, Mary in the speech of Auvergne — the Church keeps a memory older and surer than the documents that record it. The chanted prayers of his Office say that he was born "of a noble lineage" and lived a clerical life; the Vita preserved at the abbey of Mauriac is careful to note that he was neither priest nor deacon, and yet shows him converting pagans by the sheer weight of a holy life. He is called "the Confessor" because he bore witness to Christ not by shedding his blood but by spending his whole existence for him.
The age in which he lived has long been disputed. The oldest text to name him, the so-called Third Passion of Saint Austremonius, a tenth-century manuscript kept at Clermont-Ferrand, makes him a disciple of that first apostle of the Arvernes, who according to Gregory of Tours fled Rome and the persecution of Decius about the year 251. The twelfth- or thirteenth-century Vita sancti Marii, which cites an older account now entirely lost, goes further and recounts a charming tradition: that Austremonius came into Gaul in a caravan of potters travelling from the great ceramic centre of Arezzo to its workshops at Lezoux and La Graufesenque, and that Mary journeyed with him, along with Mametus, Nectarius, Anthemius and Seronatus. The Jesuit Bollandists, and Daniel van Papenbroeck in particular, refused this chronology: Mary could not have been sent by Saint Peter, nor even have assisted Austremonius in the third century, since he gives Germanic names to those he baptises — a custom of the age after the Frankish invasions — and since Gregory of Tours, who lists all the great saints of Auvergne, never mentions him. They concluded that he lived rather in the sixth or seventh century, a contemporary of Gregory or, more likely, later.
That later dating loses nothing of his glory; it rather explains his labour. In the sixth and seventh centuries the southern part of Auvergne was only partly Christian: Saint Martin of Tours had testified that about 360 it was still largely pagan, and the Council of Tours in 567 confirmed how little the countryside had been evangelised. Into that hard soil Mary went as a solitary. Tradition places his hermitage near Mont Journal, in a kind of cave beneath a great rock of basalt, in the country of Massiac. There he prayed and did penance, and there the peasants of the valley of the Alagnon came to him. His example and his word brought many to the faith and to baptism, and he became for that land what a bishop's whole mission could not have been — a father living in their midst, poor as they were poor.
The legend, faithfully retold in the medieval Passions, says that Austremonius wished to see his beloved disciple once more as death drew near. Setting out, he consecrated on the way the church of the village of Marojol; and passing through the place that would afterwards be called Saint-Mary-le-Plain, he beheld the soul of the saint rising to heaven in a halo of light. To reach the body of "Mary the Confessor" he had still to cross the gorges of the Arcueil; at Fons, the village overlooking that place, there survives the Fons Stremonii, the Fountain of Austremonius, built of great blocks of basalt with a niche that once held the bishop's statue. Coming too late for a last word, Austremonius had a mausoleum raised over him and then a basilica above the mausoleum, and the nobles he had converted endowed the church with thirty manses. Two sanctuaries, says the tradition, were built in his honour: one at Saint-Mary-le-Cros near the cave, the other at Saint-Mary-le-Plain where the vision had been given. The Church has always kept his feast on 8 June, and it is therefore supposed that he died on that day; in the diocese of Saint-Flour he is honoured on 9 June.
The chapel of Saint-Mary-le-Cros became a church and one of the most ancient shrines of Auvergne. Under the Merovingians the relics of the saint were laid in a shrine hollowed out of the trunk of an oak and suspended by four chains from the vault above the altar, bearing the inscription: "Here lies the body of Marius the Confessor." There, for centuries, the mountain people came to their intercessor.
At length a noblewoman named Ermengarde — most often identified with Ermengarde of Apchon, wife of Amblard, lord of Massiac, who had her castle at Mauriac about 1050, though the scholar Marcellin Boudet proposed instead Ermengarde of Nonette in the mid-eleventh century — judged, in the time of a bishop Stephen of Clermont, that the relics would be more worthily honoured elsewhere, and had them carried to Mauriac, where the monks of the monastery of Saint-Pierre would care for them. The translation followed the old Roman road linking Clermont to Cahors by way of Dienne; and the most famous summit of the mountains of Cantal, the Puy Mary, bears its name in memory of that passage. Tradition holds that many miracles were worked all along the route, and the second book of the Vita sancti Marii is devoted precisely to the wonders that accompanied and followed the translation.
The relics rest today in the basilica of Notre-Dame-des-Miracles at Mauriac, within the sixteenth-century "Coffin of Saint Mary" that serves as an altar. A statue and a fifteenth-century arm-reliquary of silvered copper, classed a historic monument since 1898, are likewise venerated. In the country of Massiac his traces are everywhere: on the commune of Ferrières-Saint-Mary, near the "Meadow of the Hermitage," still stands the basalt rock that sheltered him; below, in the valley of the Alagnon, is the "saint's fountain," to which miraculous power was attributed; and on the flanks of Mont Journal a block of basalt cut in the form of a seat is called the "Chair of Saint Mary," each armrest marked, they say, with the print of the saint's five fingers, where the sick sit to beg healing of pains of the loins. Villages across France carry his name — La Besseyre-Saint-Mary, Ferrières-Saint-Mary, Roannes-Saint-Mary, Saint-Mary in the Charente, Saint-Mary-le-Plain — and the Catholic parish of Saint-Mary de Haute-Auvergne gathers today the land he first evangelised.
His Life was published in Latin by the Bollandists in the Acta Sanctorum for 8 June, and the manuscript of Mauriac, number 732 of the heritage library of Clermont Auvergne Métropole, was translated in full into French in 2017. Writers of the Auvergne, from the Carmelite Géraud Vigier in 1635 to Dom Jacques Branche in 1652, ranked him with Saint Flour and Saint Géraud among the protectors of the Haute-Auvergne.
What the sources give us, then, is not a résumé of offices but the portrait of a man who possessed nothing, held no rank in the sanctuary, and yet won a whole mountain country for Christ by prayer, austerity and patient charity.
May Saint Mary the Confessor obtain for us the grace to evangelise first by the silent holiness of our own lives, and let us today choose one hidden act of penance or prayer for the conversion of those nearest us.
