St. Joavan

A life spent serving ordinary people.

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March 2 · Priest, Confessor

St. Joavan

St. Joavan

A life spent serving ordinary people.

Traditional feast

March 2
1914 / pre-1969 calendar, per Baring-Gould (1897)

Current feast

March 2
Secondary source · Wikipedia

Represents

Priest
Confessor

Early life

Selected sentences from the original account, unaltered.

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.

What they represent

How they teach us to live

Drawn from themes in the original account

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.

Read more

The full original · 87 words

Read Baring-Gould’s full account

Baring-Gould’s sources: Venerated in Brittany. Authorities:—A Life by Albert Le Grand, and the lections of the Church of S. Paul de Léon. Albert Le Grand wrote his life in 1623, from old MSS. histories and legends preserved at Léon in his time.

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 days

Feast: March 2

Nine days · Free

Pray the novena
with us.

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.

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← All 1727 saints in the library
Sources & notes

Feast-day sources

Sources

Credits

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.