Similian of Nantes

Saint Similian of Nantes was the third bishop of the city of Nantes in Gaul, in the early fourth century, and reposed around 310. Saint Gregory of Tours testifies to his holiness and gives him the title "great confessor". He is said to have brought to Christianity a certain Donatian, who in turn brought his brother Rogatian.

In the time of the persecution of Diocletian the faithful begged him to leave the city with his clergy. An old book on the saints of Brittany says that he remained steadfast in the persecutions of Diocletian and Maximian, wisely led the ship entrusted to him and himself buried the remains of the two heroes of the faith, Donatian and Rogatian (who died, it says, in 287; commemorated on 24 May). At Nantes he has a church, on a hill on the bank of the Erdre, which an old tradition says stands over his grave. It is told that in the days of Clovis the city was spared from a Saxon invasion, when the besiegers, seeing one night a procession of white-⁠clad figures with candles coming out of his church, fled in panic. When the Normans took the city in 843 they are said to have thrown Similian's remains into a well, and in the Middle Ages pilgrims came to drink from it in the hope of healing. He is commemorated on 16 June as a saint of the West before the Great Schism (a saint of the undivided Church), by the New Calendar.