Simeon of Trier

The Venerable Simeon of Trier (also called Simeon of Syracuse) was a monk and recluse of Greek descent from Sicily, who died in Germany, at Trier, on 1 June 1035. He is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church, especially in Germany, and as a locally venerated saint in the Orthodox Church.

He was born at Syracuse in Sicily at the end of the tenth century, to a Greek father and a Calabrian mother, in the time of Arab rule over the island. His father, a former soldier of the Byzantine army, sent him at seven to Constantinople to learn to read and write Greek. As he grew, he wished to live for God and went on pilgrimage to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. For seven years he was a guide of pilgrims to the holy places, then, tired of this life, he chose to live alone. He served a recluse who lived in a tower on the bank of the Jordan, from whom he learned the order of reclusion; forced to leave, he understood, reading the Lives of the Fathers, that he must first train in a monastery. He entered the monastery of the Mother of God at Bethlehem, and after two years the famed monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai, where he was ordained deacon. With the abbot's leave he lived alone in a small cave on the shore of the Red Sea, but after two years returned to the monastery. At the abbot's order he restored a ruined monastery on the peak of Sinai, and, still longing for solitude, he fled into the desert, but was found and called back.

In 1026 the abbot sent him to Rouen in France, to Duke Richard II of Normandy, on monastery business. On the Nile his boat was attacked by pirates, who butchered the crew; Simeon barely escaped, swimming. On shore he could not make himself understood, though he spoke Coptic, Syriac, Arabic, Greek and Latin. He reached Antioch and joined a group of about seven hundred pilgrims returning from Jerusalem, among them the German abbot Eberwin of Tholey. At Belgrade the Hungarian officials would not let them pass, so they returned through Rome to France. At Rouen he learned that the duke had died, he fulfilled his mission and travelled through France and Germany, visiting Eberwin and going to Trier. Archbishop Poppo of Trier was planning a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and invited him to come along; between 1028 and 1030 they made the journey. Simeon did not return to Egypt but went with Poppo to Trier and asked to live as a recluse in the great Roman gate, the Porta Nigra. On 29 November 1030, the feast of Saint Andrew, the archbishop held the service in which Simeon was enclosed in a cell in the gate tower before the clergy and people. According to tradition he was attacked by demons, and after his death, on 1 June 1035, miracles began.

Poppo asked for his canonisation at Rome, and Pope Benedict IX granted it in 1042; it was the second canonisation in the history of the papacy. In 1041 a church began to be built on the site of his enclosure, with a small monastery beside it; this saved the Porta Nigra from demolition in the Middle Ages. Napoleon in 1803 ordered the church removed and the gate restored to its Roman form. The relics and sarcophagus were kept in the church of Saint Gervasius and moved in 1971 to a new church of Saint Simeon; in the cathedral treasury are kept his Greek lectionary and his monk's cap. Orthodox believers in Germany are renewing the pilgrimage to his tomb. His feast is on 1 June.