FRIDOLIN OF SCKINGEN, SAINT

born , Ireland died 7th century AD, , Sckingen, Ger.; feast day March 6 Irish-born missionary who is said to have established churches among the Franks and Alamanni and who, in modern times, has been revered in southern Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Accounts of his life (generally unreliable and deriving principally from the 10th-century monk Balther of Sckingen) describe him as a man of noble birth who became an itinerant preacher in Ireland, travelling from town to town, and then crossed over to France. He lived for a while at a monastery at Poitiers and then travelled to the Rhine, building churches along the way. At Sckingen he purportedly founded a church and monastery, with a nunnery nearby.