Maguil’s first man-crush was someone else who eventually became a saint–Fursey. Maguil and Fursey were both Irish and lived during the first stretch of the 600s. Maguil was “an inseparable companion” to Fursey, who was known for his intense ecstasies in the faith. Fursey died (and, for reasons largely lost to history, was buried with three other saints in Ireland and this quartet came to be known as the four “Comely Saints”), and Maguil for a time went into a self-imposed exile.

Through his solitude, Maguil got his spiritual mojo back, and found that life was still worth living. While in his riverside hermitage in a small corner of France, a “holy English recluse” whose name was Vulgan somehow found Maguil. They developed an immediate bond and then chose to live together for several years, until such time as Vulgan became mortally ill. Maguil simply could not bear another loss of someone so close to him, someone he loved and shared his life and home with. Butler reports that Maguil’s “grief on the occasion was excessive” and also that Vulgan comforted Maguil, who prodded our saint not to repeat the tailspin he went into over Fursey, not to lose the spiritual gains he had made but to take even this grief and fold it into a deeper, richer, more textured life of the soul. This, Maguil did.

Maguil followed Vulgan in death just a short time later, and it was arranged that the two should be buried together. The Church, unsurprisingly, decided that it was more fit to disentangle the two corpses and bury Maguil separately (unlike the Comely Saints).

No special reasons are provided by Butler for why the Church ended up canonizing Maguil, and, in the intervening centuries since Butler, Maguil has been dropped from the official Calendar.

But Maguil has not dropped from mine (heck, I only just found out about him). Some day, if possible, I would gladly search and maybe even find his grave near Saint-Riquier, in northern France. And while I’m there, I’d like to commune with Vulgan as well.