Veneration
His relics are installed in Meaux Cathedral. His feast day is under debate; in Ireland it is 1 September; elsewhere it is variously 18 August, 1 August, or 30 August, with 11 August growing in acceptance as an official compromise. Meaux continued to be a great centre of devotion to Fiacre, especially during the 17th and 18th centuries. Visitors to his shrine included Anne of Austria, Bousset, and Vincent de Paul.
St Fiacre is most renowned as the patron saint of growing food and medicinal plants, sometimes more broadly referred to as simply gardening.
His reputed aversion to women is believed to be the reason he is known as the patron saint of venereal disease sufferers. He was known to heal hemorrhoids, which were called "Saint Fiacre's illness" in the Middle Ages - maybe due to the story where he sat sorrowfully on a stone and that stone softened.
Saint Fiacre is also sometimes invoked to help heal people of ills. This is not his patronage (as bestowed by the Vatican), but rather a common invocation based on his reputed skill with medicinal plants.
To celebrate the Millennium, St. Fiachra's Garden was opened in 1999 at the Irish National Stud, Tully, County Kildare, Ireland.
Read more about this topic: Fiacre
Famous quotes containing the word veneration:
“Erasmus was the light of his century; others were its strength: he lighted the way; others knew how to walk on it while he himself remained in the shadow as the source of light always does. But he who points the way into a new era is no less worthy of veneration than he who is the first to enter it; those who work invisibly have also accomplished a feat.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“It is evident, from their method of propagation, that a couple of cats, in fifty years, would stock a whole kingdom; and if that religious veneration were still paid them, it would, in twenty more, not only be easier in Egypt to find a god than a man, which Petronius says was the case in some parts of Italy; but the gods must at last entirely starve the men, and leave themselves neither priests nor votaries remaining.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)