or dismissal from the Abbot. Unhappily he died before he could be reconciled, and he was duly buried in consecrated ground. On the next morning his corpse was discovered lying huddled up and thrown out of his grave, and his relations in terror hastened to S. Benedict, who gave them a consecrated Host, and told them to put It with all possible reverence upon the breast of the young religious. This was done, and the tomb was never again found to have cast forth the body.[28]
This custom of putting a Eucharistic Particle in the grave with a dead person may seem to many very extraordinary, but it was by no means unknown in former centuries. In the Uita Basilii, the Life of S. Basil the Great, which was often attributed to Amphilochius of Iconium,[29] but is now recognized to be spurious and of about the ninth century, we are told that S. Basil reserved a portion of a consecrated Particle, even a third part, in order that It should be buried with him. Several Synods, howbeit assemblies of no supreme authority, had already condemned this practice, and others of a later date prohibited it as contrary to the end of the Blessed Sacrament as instituted by Jesus Christ.[30]
None the less in various places the custom persisted of reverently putting Particles in the graves of persons who were much honoured for their sanctity, and thus in the tomb of S. Othmar (Audomar), who died 16th November, 759, on the island of Werd in the Rhine, and whose body was transferred ten years later to the monastery of S. Gall, being solemnly entombed in 867 in the new Church of S. Othmar at S. Gall,[31] a number of Particles were found to have been placed on the spot where his head reposed.[32]
In a life of S. Cuthbert, Bishop of Lindisfarne, Patron of Durham, which is reprinted by the Bollandists,[33] it is said that at one of the Translations of his body a number of Particles were found in the coffin. Amalarius of Metz, upon the authority of the Venerable Bede says in his great treatise De ecclesiasticis officiis[34] that these Particles were put upon the breast of the saint before he was buried: “oblata super Sanctum pectus posita.” This circumstance however, is not mentioned by Bede, but it occurs in the Uita S. Cuthberti, written between 698 and 705 by a monk of Lindisfarne. Amalarius considers that this custom was doubtless derived
