Profile
Nonnosus was a Benedictine monk, then prior at the San Silvestre monastery on Monte Soratte north of Rome, Italy. He was known to have suffered great abuse and harassment from his abbot, but he was the only person who could calm the man down and reason with him. Nonnosus became abbot of Soratte himself c.560. Pope Saint Gregory the Great wrote about him.
Born
- c.500
Died
- c.575 of natural causes
- buried on Monte Soratte in the Viterbo, Italy area
- relics transferred to Castel Sant’Elia, Italy in the 9th century to prevent their destruction by invading Muslims
- relics enshrined in Freising, Germany in c.1050 by Bishop Nitker, where they became the site of pilgrimages
- relics re-buried there in a stone coffin in 1161
- oil from the eternally burning grave lamp is reported to have healing powers
- some relics taken to Bamberg, Germany in the mid-17th century; his head is known to have been enshrined by 1660
- his stone coffin in Freising was moved to the cathedral crypt in 1708; it is raised off the floor, and a tradition developed of crawling around it or under it lengthwise while praying for the intercession of Nonnosus, especially for kidney problems
- some relics enshrined in the church of San Antonio Abate in Castel Sant’Elia, Italy
Canonized
- Pre-Congregation
Patronage
- against infirmities or weakness
- against kidney ailments
- Diocese of Nepi-Sutri, Italy
- Castel Sant’Elia, Italy
- Freising, Germany
Representation
- oil lamp (legend says that he prayed over a broken oil lamp and it was miraculously reconstructed)
- large rock or stone (legend says that there a stone that teams of oxen could not remove from the monastery‘s garden; Nonnosus wanted to plant cabbages on the land, so he prayed over the stone and moved it by himself)
- jars of olive oil (legend says that after a failed olive harvest, Nonnosus filled all the olive oil jars by praying over them)
Source: https://catholicsaints.info/saint-nonnosus/
