A life spent serving ordinary people.
March 2
March 2
Priest
Confessor
Joavan, or Joevin, was a devoted disciple of St Paul of Leon. He followed Paul into Armorica (Brittany), and lived as a hermit near him, first in the country of Ack and later on the Isle of Baz.
When Paul withdrew shortly before his death, he chose Joavan as his coadjutor bishop. Joavan outlived him by only a year. Butler calls Great Britain his native country; Baring-Gould, the text on this page, makes him an Irishman and Paul's nephew. The sources differ.
Thin entry · the 1897 book gives only 87 words. We have not filled the gap with invented detail.
This saint was an Irishman by birth, and nephew of S. Paul de Léon.
Feed your mind with Scripture and good books. Learning and the Scriptures matter in this life.
Build up the community you belong to. This life was lived with and for a community.
Learn from the kind of life it was. A life spent serving ordinary people.
This saint was an Irishman by birth, and nephew of S. Paul de Léon. He studied with his uncle in Britain, and then returned to Ireland, but hearing that S. Paul had gone into Brittany, he departed for that country, and after having passed his noviciate in the monastery of Llanaterenecan, under S. Judulus, he departed to Léon, and received priest's orders [ordination; “orders” means the sacrament by which deacons, priests and bishops are ordained] from his uncle, who appointed him to the isle of Baz. He is patron of two parishes in the diocese of S. Paul de Léon.
Feast: March 2
One short email a day for nine days. The day's prayer, a line from St. Joavan's story, and a nudge to keep going.
Image: Plouvien (29) Chapelle Saint-Jaoua Statuaire 04.JPG · GO69 · CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
From Sabine Baring-Gould, The Lives of the Saints, new edition in 16 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1897), digitized text from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
Image: GO69, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
From Sabine Baring-Gould, The Lives of the Saints, new edition in 16 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1897), digitized text from Project Gutenberg. Public domain in the United States. Reproduced unedited, except for short bracketed notes in grey that we added to explain names and terms (“S.” is the old abbreviation for Saint). Some history and judgments reflect 19th-century scholarship.
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