Gaudentius of Osor

Saint Gaudentius of Osor (Ossero) was bishop of Osor on the island of Lošinj in present-⁠day Croatia from 1030 to 1042, and reposed in 1044 as a monk at Ancona. He is commemorated on 1 June.

According to his Life, written by an anonymous monk in the mid to late eleventh century, he was a native of Osor, where he became bishop. He was persecuted by other ecclesiastical leaders. Falsely accused, he travelled to Rome in 1032 to defend himself; his request to abdicate his see was declined and he was sent back with letters of approbation. On the way home he fell ill at Ancona and stayed there. In 1042 he resigned his see and became a Benedictine monk under Saint Peter Damian. He died of natural causes. A church was built in his name at Osor in the fourteenth century and still holds his relics in the altar.

A legend says that his reforms did not suit some noblemen of Osor, who took advantage of the instability in the papal state and attacked him. He escaped and hid for a year in a cave at the foot of Mount Osor, full of snakes; in his repentance he begged God to free the islands forever from poisonous snakes. Then he fled to Rome and continued his penitential life in the Benedictine monastery in Ancona, where he died on 31 May 1044. A hundred years later all the bells of Osor began to ring by themselves before dawn, and that day the citizens found in the sea under the town wall a wooden chest, and in it an iron chest holding the body of Saint Gaudentius. He was proclaimed patron of the town and of the whole island.