St. Romaric

St. Romaric (c. 570 – 653) was a Frankish nobleman of high rank at the court of the Merovingian kings, who had suffered the loss of his family's lands and fortunes in the political upheavals of the age. Coming under the influence of St. Columbanus and the Irish monastic movement then spreading through Gaul, and moved by the preaching of St. Amatus, he renounced his wealth and worldly position — freeing his serfs — and became a monk at the abbey of Luxeuil.

Together with Amatus he founded, on his own former estate, the monastery of Remiremont (Romarici Mons, "Romaric's Mountain") in the Vosges of Lorraine, a double monastery of monks and nuns famous for its practice of perpetual prayer, the laus perennis, in which choirs sang the divine praises in unbroken succession day and night. Romaric governed the community as abbot in his later years and died there in 653. He is venerated as a saint and a father of monastic life in Lorraine.