Feast day: June 10
St. Landry of Paris
A bishop of Paris remembered for his fierce charity in a time of famine, who by tradition sold even church furnishings to feed the starving and founded the city's first hospital.
Landry — in Latin Landericus — was bishop of Paris in the middle of the seventh century, during the Merovingian age. Little is recorded of his life, but he is remembered for one act of mercy that has kept his name alive for more than thirteen centuries.
During a severe famine that struck Paris, Landry exhausted the resources of his church to feed the starving, and when the ordinary supplies ran out, he is said to have sold the sacred vessels and even his own goods to buy food for the poor — a striking example of the principle that the gold of the Church belongs, in time of need, to the hungry.
Out of this same compassion he founded what became the first great hospital of Paris, the Hôtel-Dieu, near the cathedral on the Île de la Cité — an institution that would care for the city's sick and poor, in various forms, for over a thousand years, and which still exists today as one of the oldest hospitals in the world.
He governed his see with charity and died about 660. Honoured as a patron of the city he served, Landry is remembered above all as the bishop who turned the wealth of his church into bread for the poor.
He is credited with founding the Hôtel-Dieu, the great Paris hospital that has cared for the city's sick for more than thirteen centuries.
Image: Thesupermat (CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/11480c.htm
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