Saint Onuphrius

Onuphrius lived in the Egyptian desert in the fourth century, and his story has come down to us through the account of another monk, Paphnutius, who said he had met him. Paphnutius wandered the desert looking for the most isolated hermits. After days of walking he saw a figure in the distance and was frightened: it looked more like a beast than a man, covered in very long white hair, with only a few leaves around its hips. It was Onuphrius, and he had lived there for sixty years. He told him he had been a monk in a monastery in the Thebaid, and had left to be alone. He said that in all that time he had seen no one, and that an angel brought him bread. Then he begged him to stay with him that night. The next morning Onuphrius died, and Paphnutius buried him wrapped in his own cloak; as he did so, the cave and the palm tree that shaded it collapsed, as if to say there was nothing left to guard there. It is one of the most beautiful stories in the literature of the desert, and no one knows how much of it is history and how much is parable. The cult spread enormously, in East and West, and in Italy the name Onofrio has survived above all in the South. In Rome, the church on the Janiculum where Torquato Tasso died bears his name. If your name is Onofrio, today is your name day.