NEW GERMAN SAINT

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 226, 18 May 1932, Page 7

NEW GERMAN SAINT

POPE CANONISES FAMOUS SCHOLAR OF MIDDLE AGES. ALBERTUS MAGNUS. The recent. canonising fey thp Pope of Albertus Magnus was accompanied also by a Papal Bull declaring him a patristic writer. This is the first time in the history of Roman Catholicism that this honour has come to a German. The creation of the new saint adds interest to the already interesting city of Lauingen, Bavaria, where this nipst widely read and most learned man of his time was born in 1193. Situated midway between Ulm and Ingolstadt, where the Danube makes a wide curve toward the north, it was an ancient Celtic and Roman settlement, and the decisive defeat of the Huns took place near by. The town walls, the lofty, castle-like palace, the narrow streets and steeply gabled houses have preserved the town's medieval aspect. The house still stands in which Albertus Magnus was born almost seven and a half centuries ago as the son of tjie Count of Bollstadt. It bears a memorial tablet, and a mounment to the great seholar stands on the broad market place. His contemporaries regarded "Albertus Magnus as'a magician, and legends concerning him still persist among the Laujngen peasants. They tell Jiow he transformed snow into flowers, created in thirty years of labour a human head which could speak, and did othpr" suppr-human things with the help of spirits. Many other souvenirs of the day of the new saint have been preserved. One of his contemporaries was the beautiful Geiselina, noted for her charities. A loaf of bread and a lcnife always lay on a stone ip fropt of her house, so that any wanderer could help himself. Her house, the "Spnnenwirtschaft,55 and the stone still stand in the Burdengasse. Another witness from the same time is the parochial church, one of Bavaria5s most beautiful Gothic cathedrals. In front of it stands a roughly hewn stone chair, one of the few still existing "sinner's seats55 of the Middle Ages, on which the Hester Prynnes of that day had to sit and suffer tbe seprn of the churchgoers. Yet another of the many interesting sights in Lauingen are the hanging gardens. Deep, dark courtyards lie between the town walls and the adjoining houses. The inhabitants of these pass along the walls, and from them up stairways to _ reach their homes. Between the stairways the spaces are boarded over and flowers and vegetables are grown there, high above the courtyards.