Feastday: March 28
Patron of Naso, Italy
1139 - 1236

While praying in church, Conon, a Basilian monk of Naso, Sicily, resolved to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In the Holy Land, he experienced a vision of a serpent coiling itself around the throat of a certain priest. At once Conon went to the priest and related the vision as a warning to him. The priest confessed to Conon that he had hoarded money for himself. Conon persuaded him to give all his riches to the poor. After returning to Sicily, Conon healed a boy afflicted with apoplexy. In 1571, over three centuries after Conon’s death, the city of Naso was stricken with a famine resulting from stormy weather that had prevented both the harvesting of the grain crop and the import of provisions by ship. The people thereupon invoked the intercession of Conon. As a sea captain was preparing to sail with a load of grain from a Sicilian port, Conon appeared to him in a vision and asked him to change his destination to a port near Naso. Torn between his fear of the rough seas and his reverential fear of the vision, the skipper in the end did as Conon had asked and completed the voyage safely. The grain from his ship reached Naso, ending the famine.