The first official Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin, September 8th
Saint Maurille was a disciple of Saint Martin. Originally from Italy, he became a monk at Marmoutier. He founded a monastery near Chalonnes in Anjou and in 423 he became bishop of Angers. According to a very old oral tradition, the first written records of this story are found in the chronicles of the monks of Saint-Florent and Saumur.
The Virgin appeared to him in 430. Saint Maurille had come to visit the monastery of Mont Glonne on the shores of the Loire between Nantes and Angers. At the foot of a hill where he had retired to pray in solitude, he suddenly saw himself surrounded by a celestial light. It was the Blessed Virgin Mary holding in her arms her divine Child who deigned to appear to him in a “leart” or a poplar tree. She told her devoted servants that it was the will of God and the good pleasure of her divine Son that he should establish in his diocese a solemn feast of the day of her Holy Birth on the 8th of September.
It was therefore in Anjou that this feast began to be officially celebrated. Saint-Maurille had a chapel built on the same site, commonly referred to in Latin as the chapel of “Beata Maria des Maurillo”.
In 786 Charlemagne attributed to Our Lady of Le Marillais the battle he won not far from there at the foot of Mount Glonne.
The apparitions of Le Puy and Saint-Maurille thus precede the great Marian Council of Ephesus by a short time, and these two events strengthened Marian piety and, together with other elements, led to the dogmatic definition of the great Council in 431: Mary is the Mother of God. It is thus from the 5th century onwards that the number of known and historically attested Marian apparitions increases steadily.
