AMAND, Saint
Born in Aquitaine to Serenus and Amantia, he was educated in a Benedictine monastery on the island of Yeu off the coast of Vendée, where he received the tonsure at Tours. Traveling to Bourges, he obtained permission from the bishop to build a cell on the city’s ramparts, spending fifteen years in solitude there. Around 620, after coming to Rome, he had a vision in which St Peter ordered him to devote himself to preaching in Gaul. Of ardent temperament and rich in zeal, his life became a continuous pilgrimage (partly legendary regarding Carinthia and the Basque country) as a missionary bishop—he appears to have been consecrated before 630—without a fixed diocese. He is the great apostle of Belgium and the true initiator of the monastic movement that flourished powerfully during the seventh century in the northern regions. He preached the Gospel unceasingly in Gaul, where among other foundations he established the monastery of Barisis, and in Belgium from Ghent to the Scheldt estuary. At Elnone he founded the monastery that later took his name and became a center for the spread of monastic life, as well as the monasteries of Mont-Blandin (shortly before 639) and Saint-Bavo near Ghent, all placed under the Rule of St Benedict in the form of Luxeuil, and the church of SS Peter and Paul in Antwerp.
Appointed bishop of Tongres (with his see at Maastricht), he carried on intense activity in that diocese; faced with difficulties from the clergy of Tongres, he considered returning to the eremitical life, but was dissuaded by Pope Martin, who in 649 sent him a famous letter in which, after discoursing on Monothelite heresy, he ordered Amand to convene a synod of the bishops of Austrasia.
He died on 17 April 674 or 675, yet his feast was linked with that of St Vedast on 6 February from at least the first half of the eighth century; this date then passed into the Roman Martyrology and was mistakenly taken by his second biographer, Milo, as the day of his death.