November XXVI

Saint Peter, Martyr

bishop of alexandria.

From Euseblus, Theodoret, &c. See Tillemont, t. 5; Celliler, t. 4, p. 17; Oral, t. 4, l. 10.

a. d. 311.

Eusebius¹ calls this great prelate the excellent doctor of the Christian religion, and the chief and divine ornament of bishops; and tells us that he was admirable both for his extraordinary virtue, and for his skill in the sciences, and profound knowledge of the holy scriptures. In the year 300 he succeeded Theonas in the see of Alexandria, being the sixteenth archbishop from St. Mark; he governed that church with the highest commendation, says the same historian, during the space of twelve years; for the nine last of which he sustained the fury of the most violent persecutions carried on by Dioclesian and his successors. Virtue is tried and made perfect by sufferings; and Eusebius observes that the fervor of our saint’s piety and the rigor of his penance increased with the calamities of the church. That violent storm which affrighted and disheartened several bishops and inferior ministers of the church, did but awake his attention, inflame his charity, and inspire him with fresh vigor. He never ceased begging of God for himself and his flock necessary grace and courage, and exhorting them to die daily to their passions, that they might be prepared to die for Christ. The confessors he comforted and encouraged by word and example, and was the father of many martyrs who sealed their faith with their blood. His watchfulness and care were extended to all the churches of Egypt, Thebais or Upper Egypt, and Lybia, which were under his immediate inspection. Notwithstanding the activity of St. Peter’s charity and zeal, several in whom the love of this world prevailed, basely betrayed their faith, to escape torments and death. Some, who had entered the combat with excellent resolutions, and had endured severe torments, had been weak enough to yield at last. Others bore the loss of their liberty and the hardships of imprisonment, who yet shrunk at the sight of torments, and deserted their colors when they were called to battle. A third sort prevented the inquiries of the persecutors, and ran over to the enemy before they had suffered any thing for the faith. Some, seeking false cloaks to palliate their apostacy, sent heathens to sacrifice in their name, or accepted of attestations from the magistrates, setting forth that they had complied with the imperial edict, though in reality they had not. These different degrees of apostacy were distinctly considered by the holy bishop, who prescribed a suitable term of public penance for each in his canonical epistle.²

Among those who fell during this storm, none was more considerable than Meletius, bishop of Lycopolis in Thebais. That bishop was charged with several crimes; but apostacy was the main article alleged against him. St. Peter called a council, in which Meletius was convicted of having sacrificed to idols, and of other crimes, and sentence of deposition was passed against him. The apostate had not humility enough to submit, or to seek the remedy of his deep wounds by condign repentance, but put himself at the head of a discontented party which appeared ready to follow him to any lengths. To justify his disobedience, and to impose upon men by pretending a holy zeal for discipline, he published many calumnies against St. Peter and his council; and had the assurance to tell the world that he had left the archbishop’s communion, because he was too indulgent to the lapsed in receiving them too soon and too easily to communion. Thus he formed a pernicious schism which took its name from him, and subsisted a hundred and fifty years. The author laid several snares for St. Peter’s life, and though, by an overruling providence, these were rendered ineffectual, he succeeded in disturbing the whole church of Egypt with his factions and violent proceedings: for he infringed the saint’s patriarchal authority, ordained bishops within his jurisdiction, and even placed one in his metropolitical see. Sozomen tells us, these usurpations were carried on with less opposition during a certain time when St. Peter was obliged to retire, to avoid the fury of the persecution. Arius, who was then among the clergy of Alexandria, gave signs of his pride and turbulent spirit by espousing Meletius’s cause as soon as the breach was open, but soon after quitted that party, and was ordained deacon by St. Peter. It was not long before he relapsed again to the Meletians, and blamed St. Peter for excommunicating the schismatics, and forbidding them to baptize. The holy bishop, by his knowledge of mankind, was by this time convinced that pride, the source of uneasiness and inconstancy, had taken deep root in the heart of this unhappy man; and that so long as this evil was not radically cured, the wound of his soul was only skinned over by a pretended conversion, and would break out again with greater violence than ever. He therefore excommunicated him, and could never be prevailed with to revoke that sentence. St. Peter wrote a book on the Divinity, out of which some quotations are preserved in the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon.³ Also a paschal treatise of which some fragments are extant.⁴ From St. Epiphanius⁵ it appears that St. Peter was in prison for the faith in the reign of Dioclesian, or rather of Galerius Maximian; but after some time recovered his liberty. Maximin Daia, Csar in the East, renewed the persecution in 311, which had been considerably abated by a letter written the same year by the emperor Galerius in favor of the Christians. Eusebius informs us, that Maximin coming himself to Alexandria, St. Peter was immediately seized, when no one expected such a storm, and, without any form of trial, by the sole order of the tyrant, hurried to execution. With him were beheaded three of his priests, Faustus, Dio, and Ammonius. This Faustus seems by what Eusebius writes, to be the same person of that name who, sixty years before, was deacon to St. Dionysius, and the companion of his exile.*

The canons of the church are holy laws framed by the wisest and most experienced pastors and saints for the regulation of the manners of the faithful, according to the most pure maxims of our divine religion and the law of nature, many intricate rules of which are frequently explained, and many articles of faith expounded in them. Every clergyman is bound to be thoroughly acquainted with the great obligations of his state and profession: for it is one of the general and most just rules of the canon law, and even of the law of nature, that “No man is excused from a fault by his ignorance in things which, by his office, he is bound to know.”^† That any one among the clergy should be a stranger to those decrees of the universal church and statutes of his own diocese, which regard the conduct and reformation of the clergy, is a neglect and an affected ignorance which aggravates the guilt of every transgression of which it is the cause, according to a well-known maxim of morality. After the knowledge of the holy scriptures of the articles of faith, and the rules of a sound Christian morality, every one who is charged with the direction of others, is obliged to have a competent tincture of those parts of the canon law which may fall in the way of his practice: bishops and their assistants stand in need of a more profound and universal skill both in what regards their own office, (in which Barbosa⁶ may be a manuduction,) and others.

St. Nicon, Surnamed Metanoite, Confessor

Nicon, a native of Pontus, and of a noble family, in his youth fled privately from his friends to a monastery called the stone of God, where he lived twelve years in the practice of the most austere penance and humble prayer, by which he studied perfectly to die to himself. His heart became quite penetrated with holy compunction and the purest love of God, and he spoke on virtue with an unction which pierced the souls of those that heard him discourse on heavenly things. The incredible spiritual fruit which his conferences and private exhortations produced, induced his superiors to employ him in preaching the word of God to the people. This office he exercised in quality of apostolic missionary in most parts of Armema, and afterwards passed into Crete, which island was then in the hands of the Saracens. Penance was the great duty which the saint announced to the people in imitation of St. John Baptist, and he began all his sermons with these words: Metanoite, or do penance; whence this surname was given him. The necessity and obligation that all men lie under of doing penance, he inculcated according to the maxims of the gospel; and he excellently explained the conditions of sincere repentance. For thousands and thousands befool themselves, and mock God in this point, when, by venting a few sighs and groans they persuade themselves that they have repented, though their hearts all the while deceive them. A true penitent must apply himself to the difficult work of self-examination by a strict scrutiny into, and survey of, the whole state of his soul, in order to discover every latent inordinate affection or passion. He must pursue sin home to his inclinations, and dislodge it thence; otherwise all he does will be to little purpose; so long as the root of sin remains lurking in the affections, it will shoot out again, and God who sees it there, pays no regard to lying vows and protestations. By earnest prayer, mortification, alms, and holy meditation, the penitential sorrow must be improved, till it has forced its way into the very innermost corners and recesses of the soul, shaken all the powers of sin, and formed that new creature which is little understood among Christians, though the very essence of a Christian life. By teaching penitents thus to lay the axe to the very root of sin, St. Nicon had the comfort to see in my wonderful conversions wrought among Christians, by which the face of religion seemed changed among them through the whole island. The saint, fearing lest the infant principles of conversion might be stifled and overland by the cares of the world, was infinitely solicitous to engage penitents to cut off and renounce all occasions of sin, to strengthen their souls in the fervent practice of all virtues and good works, and to cultivate the seeds of piety which the divine grace had sown in them. The sweetness with which the holy preacher recommended the most severe maxims of the gospel, made our faith appear amiable to the Mahometans themselves. After having preached in Crete almost twenty years, and settled all the churches of that island in good order, he passed to the continent in Europe, and announced the divine word in Peloponnesus, Achaia, Epirus, and other parts of Greece confirming his doctrine with miracles. He died in a monastery in Pelo ponnesus in 998, and is honored both in the Greek and Roman Calendars See his authentic life in Baronius, Annal. t. 10.

St. Sylvester Gozzolini, Abbot of Osimo

institutor of the sylvestrin monks

This saint was born of a noble family at Osimo or Osmo, about fourteen miles from Loretto, in 1177. He studied the laws and theology at Bologna and Padua, and being instituted to a canonry at Osimo, made prayer, pious reading, and the instruction of others his whole employment. His zeal in reproving vice raised him enemies, and his bishop, whom he admonished of certain neglects in the discharge of his office, declared himself his persecutor. These trials served to purify the heart of the servant of God, and prepared him for the grace of the pure love of God. The sight of the carcass of a man who had been admired in his lifetime for his beauty and great accomplishments, completed his abhorrence and contempt of this treacherous world, so that, deploring its scandals and blindness, he left the city privately, and retired into a desert thirty miles from Osimo, being then forty years old. To satisfy the importunity of others, in 1231, he built a monastery upon Monte Fano, two miles from Fabriano, in the marquisate of Ancona. In this house he settled the rule of St. Bennet without any mitigation; and, in 1248, obtained of Innocent IV., who was then at Lyons, the confirmation of his institute. He lived to found twenty-five monasteries in Italy, and leaving his disciples heirs of his double spirit of penance and prayer, departed to the Lord on the 26th of November, in 1267, being ninety years old. God was pleased to work several miracles at his tomb, and his name is inserted in the Roman Martyrology. See his life by Fabrini, fourth general of his order, in Breve Chron. della Congreg. de Monachi Sylvestrini; and Helyot, Hist. des Ordres Relig. t. 6, p. 170.

St. Conrad, Bishop of Constance, C.

This eminent servant of God was, by his humility and sanctity, the bright ornament of the most illustrious house of the Guelphs, in Germany, which so many princes have honored with their martial achievements and sovereign dignities. Their pedigree is derived by some from Clodion, king of the Franks, and Wittekind the Great, (who was created by Charlemagne first duke of Saxony,) and consequently from Woden, the chief god, and the stock of the principal royal families of the Saxons which founded the Heptarchy in England. The name of Guelph or Guelf was taken by this family in the reign of Charlemagne,* at which time they were counts of Altorff, now called Weingarten in Suabia, not Altorff, the university near Nuremberg in Franconia; nor the capital of Uri in Switzerland. Conrad, abbot of Ursperg, who gives the noble pedigree of this family, exceedingly extols the devotion of its princes and princesses, their piety towards God, and their most religious attachment to the apostolic see.¹ Guelph I., whose name was retained by his descendants, was son of Isenbart, count of Altorff, and his wife Irmentrudis, sister-in-law to Charlemagne, and foundress of the great Benedictin abbey of Altorff.* Judith, daughter of Guelph I., was married to the emperor Louis Dbonnaire, and is famous in the history of his troubles. Two of her brothers became dukes of Bavaria. Conrad Rudolf brother of Judith, was the second count of Altorff of this name, and his son Henry the third count, and founder of the monastery of Altonmunster. He left two sons, St. Conrad and Rudolf, fourth count of Altorff, whom Rimucalls Henry II. against the authority of the abbot of Ursperg and Manlius the former of whom was intimately acquainted with this illustrious family in the twelfth age, and copied his account of it from original records.

Conrad was a saint from the cradle, and was sent young to the famous schools which then flourished at Constance under the direction of the bishop of that city. For the city of Vendonissa or Vindisch, near Bader, being destroyed by Childebert II., king of France, in 594, the episcopal see which had been founded there by St. Bert, about the year 490, was removed to Constance, a city so called from the emperor Constans. As the love of God had moved Conrad to despise the vanities of the world, so it inspired him with an uncommon fervor in his service, lest he should lose the crown by sloth, to purchase which he had forsaken all things. His seriousness showed how deeply the great concerns of eternity were impressed upon his mind, and restrained all sloth, levity, or dissolute mirth: yet was it far from carrying with it any thing of sourness or melancholy, which no less than all capriciousness, changeableness of temper, and uneasiness of mind, are certain signs of pride and unmortified passions. The temper of our saint’s mind was always even, serene, and cheerful, which discovered at the bottom a lasting joy, which is always the fruit of inward peace, and produces an unalterable sweetness in conversation even under the greatest disappointments. An unaffected simplicity, which is also an attendant of sincere virtue, shone with lustre in all his actions, and, joined with his perfect humility and religious piety, gave him in his whole deportment an air of dignity which belongs to virtue only, and is far superior to that which worldly greatness bestows. Hence every one approached him with awe and veneration mixed with confidence and affection, which the charms of his tender and obliging charity and humility inspired. Soon after he was ordained priest, the provostship of the cathedral, the next dignity to that of the bishop, was conferred upon him: and that prelate, whose name was Noting, dying in 934, our saint was unanimously chosen to fill the episcopal chair, though it was a considerable time before his consent could by any means be extorted. St. Ulric, bishop of Ausburg, who had strenuously promoted his election frequently visited him for the sake of holding pious conferences together and so close were the bands of holy friendship in which these two great prelates were linked together, that they almost seemed to have but one soul which animated two bodies. St. Conrad having dedicated himself with all that he possessed to God, made an exchange of his estates with his brother for other lands situate near Constance, and settled them all upon that church and the poor, having first built and endowed three stately churches at Constance, in honor of St. Maurice, St. John Evangelist, and St. Paul.

The holy wars having made pilgrimages to Jerusalem very frequent in that age, our saint thrice visited those holy places, making his journeys truly pilgrimages of austere penance and devotion. Worldly conversation the saint always shunned as much as possible, not only as a loss of time, (which is of all things the most precious to the servant of God,) but also as the bane of the spirit of recollection and compunction, which in one who has dedicated himself to the divine service, and to the daily ministry of the altar, ought always to be most perfect. How religiously exact the holy bishop was in whatever belonged to his sacred functions, particularly to the adorable sacrifice of the mass, appears from the following instance It happened that a great spider dropped into the chalice while the prelate was saying mass on Easter-day: the insect might have been taken out, and then decently burnt, some spiders being poisonous and dangerous; but out of devotion and respect for the holy mysteries, the bishop swallowed the spider; which he vomited up some hours after without receiving any harm.* In comforting and relieving the poor, in instructing and exhorting his flock, and in all other functions of his charge our saint was indefatigable; and he labored in the vineyard of the Lord with equal fervor and watchfulness from the very beginning of the morning to the last hour of the day. He went to receive his salary in eternal joys in the year 976, having been bishop forty-two years. He was buried in the church of St. Maurice, and two blind men recovered their sight, and other sick their health, at his tomb. Other miracles are recorded in the Chronicle of Constance, subjoined to his life, and he was canonized by Calixtus II. about the year 1120. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on the 26th of November. See his life published by Leibnitz, scriptor Brunswicens, t. 3, p. 1; also in the History of the Illustrious Family of the Guelphs, ib. t. 2, p. 783, likewise in F. Raderus’s Brevaria Sancta, t. 1. p. 101.

¹ Eus. Hist. 1. 9, c. 6, p. 444.

² Ap. Beveridge inter Canones Eccl. Græcæ. Item Labbe Conc. t. 1.

³ Conc. Ephes. Act. 1. p. 508; Act. 7. p. 836. (Conc. t. 3.) Conc. Chalced. Act 1. p. 286.

⁴ Ap. Du Fresne, lord Du Cange Pref. in Chron. Pasch, n. 7. p. 4, 5.

⁵ S. Epiph. hær. 68.

* We have two sorts of acts of St. Peter’s martyrdom, the one published by Surius, the other from Me taphrastes, published by Combefis: both of no credit; and inconsistent both with themselves, and with Eusebius and Theodoret.

^† The canon law is founded upon, and presupposes in some cases the decisions of the civil or Roman law. But for this, Corvinus’s Abstract, or Vinnius upon the Institutes, or some parts of Syntagma Juris Universi per Petr. Gregorium; or the French Advocate, John Domat’s immortal work, entitled, Les Loix Civiles dans leur Ordre Naturel, will be a sufficient introduction. The canon law may be begun by Fleury’s Institutions au Droit Ecclésiastique. The decrees of the general councils should follow, and those of our own country, by Spelman or Wilkins, &c.; or Cabassutius’s Epitome of the Councils, the second edition. in folio: then Antonii Augustini Epitome Juris Pontificii, and his excellent book De Emendatione Gratiani, with the additions of Baluze. At least some good commentator on the Decretals must be carefully studied as Fagnanus, Gonzales, Reiffenstuel, or Smaltzgruben; for the new ecclesiastical law, the decrees of the council of Trent, and some other late councils, those especially of Milan; the important parts of the latest bullaries of Clement XII. and Benedict XIV., with Barbosæ Collectanea Bullarii. Van Espen is excellent for showing the origin of each point of discipline; but is to be read with caution in some few places. The French advocate, Louis d’Hericourt’s Droit Ecclésiastique François is esteemed; but the author sometimes waded out of his depth. This may serve for a general plan to those clergymen who have an hour a day to bestow on this study, and are only deterred from it by wanting an assistant to direct them in it. Those who have not this leisure or opportunity of books, may content themselves with studying some good author who has reduced this study into a regular method, or short collection. Cabassutius’s Theoria et Praxis Juris Canonici is accurate; that of Pichier, in five small volumes, is full, clear, and more engaging: but his relaxed principles concerning usury (which, by order of pope Benedict XIV were confuted by Concina, a Dominican friar) must be guarded against. With such helps any one may easily make himself master of those parts which are necessary in his circumstances. How scandalous it is to see a minister of God ready enough to study the extent of the laws concerning parish dues, and strain them in favor of his avarice, yet supinely careless in learning the duties of his ministry and his grievons obligations to God and his flock! The fatal neglect of those wholesome laws which were framed to set a bar to vice and human passions, to fence the ecclesiastical order against the spirit of the world breaking in upon it, and to check a relaxation of manners which tends utterly to extirpate the spirit of Christ among the laity, will excuse, it is hoped, this short note upon a subject which deserves so much to be strongly inculcated.

⁶ Barbosa, De Officio Episcopt. Item De Officio Barochi.

* Some say this name was the Roman Catulus or Catiline turned into German. Others tell us, that Charlemagne, complimenting the count of Altorff at court upon the birth of his son, called him his young Guelph, whence the count gave his son that name. See these and other etymologies in Leibnitz’s collection. From the silence of the ancient historians of this family the fabulous story of the birth of three hundred and sixty-five children, which was not so much as heard of by any of them, is abundantly confuted. This family was ingrafted upon that of Este by Azo of Este marrying the heiress of Guelphs. The Actii, a Roman family in the time of the republic, retired to Este or Ateste, (now in the Venetian Lombardy,) and thence took the name of Este, or Atestina Domus. Henry of Este was created by Charlemagne, prince of Treviso and margrave of Este. The princes of his posterity were often vicars of the empire in Italy, and much increased their territories. Boniface, a prince of this family, became margrave of Tuscany, and possessed Ferrara, Placentia, Mantua, Modena, Reggio, Parma, Lucca, Ancona, and Spoletto. His daughter and heiress Mathildes married Godfrey duke of Lorraine, and after his death Guelph VI. duke of Bavaria. She bequeathed great part of her estates of the see of Rome. (See Vita Mathildis Comitissæ, a Denizone scripta, ap. Murat. scrip. Ital. t. 5. p. 244. Ejusdem Chartula Donationis bonorum suorum facta Ecclesiæ Romanæ, p. 384.) From Azo IV. of Este, in 1060, the present house of Modena is descended. Ottoberto, of this family of Este, passed into Germany with the emperor Otho I. in 963. Azo, his descendant, in the next century, by a marriage with an only daughter of Guelph II. and sister to Guelph III., upon the death of this latter, inherited the dominions of that family in Suabia, and left them to his son Guelph IV., count of Altorff, who was afterwards made duke of Bavaria by the emperor Henry IV. All his posterity took the name of Guelphs: among them Henry the Lion was duke of Bavaria and Upper and Lower Saxony, and united in his own dominions the hereditary estates of five families. After many prosperous wars he was proscribed by the emperor Henry I. in the diet of Wurtzburg, in 1180, but afterward recovered, by the intercession, of the king of England and other friends, the duchies of Brunswick and Lunenburg, with other territories in Lower Saxony, lying between the Elbe and the Weser, which have been ever since possessed by his illustrious posterity. Bavaria passed from Henry the Lion into the family of Otho, count Wittelsbach, from which are descended the present electoral families of Bavaria and the Palatinate. See the collection of the Brunswick historians, made by the celebrated Leibnitz, who searched, for that purpose the monasteries and libraries of Germany. See also Origines Guelphicæ, in two additional volumes, folio, by Schaldius, present historiographer to the house of Brunswick Lunenburg, at Hanover, in 1750.

¹ Abbas Ursperg, in Chron. ad an, 1126.

* Guelph III., count of Altorff, being created duke of Carinthia, removed the monastery of Altorff into his own neighbouring palace upon the hill called Weingarten, or of the vineyards, in 1094; whence this whole place took that name. Guelph IV. duke of Bavaria, and his wife Judith, natural daughter to the king of England, much enriched this abbey. Their son, Guelph IV., who died without issue, was buried there in St. Oswald’s chapel, with his father, mother, and grandfather. His brother and successor, Henry, duke of Bavaria, after the death of his wife, in 1124, resigned his dominions to his son, Gueiph VI., and made his monastic profession in this house. See Bruschius, Hist. Cœnobii Vinearum. Item, Manlii description, ejusdem.

* Alpinus, in his History of Spiders, shows that some species of spiders are medicinæ and most other are harmless. Yet some are poisonous. See Philosophical Transactions. &c.

 Butler, A., The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs and Other Principal Saints (New York 1903) IV, 562-568.