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"A man of great culture and rich in the gifts of grace, both as an indefatigable builder of monasteries and an uncompromising penitential preacher, he spent all his energies in feeding the Christian roots of the Europe that was being born". This is the portrait of Saint Colombano, the Irish abbot born in 543 and died in 615, the focus of today's audience. The Pope defined him a "European" saint, because "as a monk, a missionary and a writer, he worked in many countries of Western Europe". "Along with the Irish of his time", Saint Colombano "was aware of the cultural unity of Europe": in one of his letters, written around 600 to Pope Gregory the Great, "we can find for the very first time - highlighted Benedict XVI - the phrase ‘totius Europae - of all Europe', speaking of the presence of the Church in the Continent". Saint Colombano's "message", according to the Pope, "focuses on a firm reference to conversion and the detachment from earthly goods, with a view to eternal inheritance". In particular, "with his ascetic life and uncompromising behaviour before the corruption of the powerful, he recalls the severe figure of John the Baptist". An "austerity", that of Saint Colombano's, which however "is never an end in itself". Comece has recently proposed to appoint Saint Colombano the patron saint of Western Europe. A monk at 20, around the age of 50 Colombano leaves Ireland "to venture, with twelve mates, on a missionary work on the European continent, where the migration of peoples from the north and east had made Christianised regions fall back into paganism". On the coast of Brittany, Colombano and his followers carried out a work "of re-evangelisation, through the testimony of life". In the Rule written by Saint Colombano in Luxeuil - "the only Irish ancient monastic rule we have nowadays, commented the Holy Father, he "draws the ideal image of the monk" and also develops "a sort of criminal code for the monks' breaches" and brings "private and reiterated confession and penance" into the continent. "As uncompromising as he was in every moral issue", as well as with the bishops Colombano "came into conflict with the royal house too". That's why he was sentenced to exile and was engaged in the "new work of re-evangelisation", first on the Rhine and near Lake Constance (where the abbey of Saint Gall grew from the hermitage founded by one of his monks, Gallus), then in Italy, where, despite the "benevolent reception" of the Lombard court, he had to face the Arian heresy and the schism that were threatening the Church. In Bobbio, where he died, he founded a new monastery, "which would then become a cultural centre, comparable to the famous one of Montecassino".