MAGICIAN WHO WAS CANONISED

Hawera Star, Volume LI, 21 May 1932, Page 14

MAGICIAN WHO WAS CANONISED

rpHE recent canonising by the 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 most widely read and most learned man of his time was born in 1193. Situated midway between Ulin and Ingolstadt, where the Danube makes a wide curve towards 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 the 'Count of Bollstadt. It bears a memorial tablet, and a monument -to •the great scholar stands on the broad market place. His contemporaries regarded Albertus Magnus as a magician, and legends concerning hirn still persist among the Lauingen peasants. They tell how he transformed snow into flowers, created in 30 years of labour

Patristic Writer of Old Bavaria

I a human head which could speak, and I did other superhuman things with the I help of spirits. 1 Many other souvenirs of the day of the new saint have been preserved. One of his contemporaries was the beautiful Gciselina, noted for her charities. A loaf of bread and a knife always lay on a stone in front of her house, so that any wanderer could help himself. Her house, the "Sonnenwirtschaft,’’ and the stone still stands in the Burdergasse. Another witness from the same time is the parochial church, one of Bavaria’s most beautiful Gothic cathedrals. In front of it stands a roughly he.wn stone chair, one of the few still existing "sinner’s seats’’ of the Middle Ages, on which the Hester Prynnes of that day had to sit and suffer the scorn 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 hoarded over and flowers and vegetables are grown -there, high above the courtyards.