PLACID, Saint. - Disciple of St. Benedict. His only biographical source is the Dialogues of St. Gregory the Great (II, 3-7: PL 66, 140-46; critical edition by U. Moricca, Rome 1924, pp. 85-90), from which we learn that at the age of 7 P. was offered to St. Benedict at Subiaco by his father Tertullus, a Roman patrician; having fallen into the Lake of Nero, where he had gone to draw water, he was miraculously drawn to land by St. Maurus (v.).

His cult underwent an evolution, which U. Berlière has clarified (see bibliography). The most ancient documents commemorate him on October 5 as a "confessor." In the second half of the 11th century, at Montecassino, the opinion arose that the Sicilian martyr of the same name (v. next entry), commemorated on that same day in the Jeronymian Martyrology, might be the disciple of St. Benedict; the hypothesis was romanticized by the librarian and archivist Peter the Deacon (d. ca. 1159) with the Vita (or Acta) in Placidi et fratrum eius Eutychii, Victorini ac Flaviae sororis etc., which he attributes to Gordian, a supposed companion of the Saint, who escaped the pirate massacre at Messina (text in Mabillon, Acta SS. Ord. Benedict., I, Paris 1668, pp. 45-79; and in Acta SS. Octobris, III, Antwerp 1770, pp. 114-38). Therefore the mission of P. to Sicily to found monasteries there (like that of St. Maurus in Gaul) and his martyrdom belong to legend, which nevertheless entered, in the 16th century (v. next entry), into the Breviary and the Roman Martyrology (October 5).

Bibliography7 works

BIBL.: BHL, coll. 6859-64; Martyr. Romanum, p. 435; E. Caspar, Petrus Diaconus und die Montecassiner Fälschungen, Berlin 1909, pp. 47-72; I. Schuster, in Rev. bänd., 27 (1910), p. 88 ff. (note 4: for the image of St. P.); id., Liber Sacramentorum, IX, Turin 1928, pp. 9-11; U. Berlière, Le culte de st Placide, in Rev. bänd., 33 (1921), pp. 19-45; Ph. Schmitz, Histoire de l'Ordre de st Benoît, I, 2nd ed., Maredsous 1948, pp. 38 and 74.

Igino Cecchetti

@incollection{ec9_placido_santo, author = {Cecchetti, Igino}, title = {Placido, santo}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {IX}, pages = {1597}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1952}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/placido-santo} }

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Placid, Saint

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