Marinus of Besalú

Marinus of Besalú was a bishop and confessor, venerated as a saint at the Benedictine monastery of Sant Pere at Besalú in Catalonia, where his remains lay. He was venerated in the Catholic Church and, apart from the Martyrology, is still kept in the calendars of the Orthodox Church.

Nothing is known of his life, not even when he lived. Antoni Vicenç Domènec says that his body, together with those of Saints Evidius and Patronus, was venerated in the monastery, that their reliquaries stood on the high altar with lamps kept permanently lit, and that the feast of Marinus was kept there on 19 August, with the proper office of a bishop and confessor. On the high altar, above the chest of relics, there was a carving representing him as a bishop.

Probably, like other holy bodies gathered in the monastery, they were remains of venerated persons from other places; the loss of the relics, the archives and the monastery itself makes it impossible to find out to whom they belonged. In any case he was a bishop from before the tenth century, the century the monastery was founded. From these few data, some old calendars speak of a Marinus of Besalú, abbot and bishop of Besalú, who died around 800. The error is evident, since the monastery was not founded until 977 and the bishopric of Besalú existed only between 1017 and 1020. The disentailment of church property in the nineteenth century led to the abandonment of his cult and the disappearance of the relics. He appears as a probably real saint in the Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandists. Lacking data, he was dropped from the Roman Martyrology, but is kept in the calendars of the Orthodox Church, which took over the Catholic calendar from before the separation.