Agrippinus

Saint Agrippinus, also rendered Agrippino in Italian, was a bishop of Naples in Campania during the third century of the Christian era. Later Neapolitan tradition numbers him as the sixth occupant of that see, in a succession that local legend traced back to Saint Aspren, reputedly ordained by the Apostle Peter. No contemporary biography, letter, or imperial record of Agrippinus survives. Knowledge of him rests on the evidence of an early liturgical cult, on medieval catalogues of the bishops of Naples, and on the archaeology of his burial and subsequent translations. Modern historians therefore treat the third-century dating as broadly credible while regarding any more precise chronology of his birth, consecration, or death as unverified. Claims that assign exact years to his episcopate, often drawn from later episcopal lists, cannot be confirmed from sources close to his own time.

Christianity in the Bay of Naples during Agrippinus’s lifetime was still a minority faith within a densely pagan urban and port environment. The community would have gathered in house churches and buried its dead in extra-mural cemeteries. Whether his episcopate fell in a time of relative peace or of persecution cannot be established from the sources. Unlike Saint Januarius, who is remembered as a martyr of the Diocletianic persecution, Agrippinus is not described in the earliest calendars as a martyr and is generally classed as a confessor-bishop. Stories that he performed numerous miracles during his life belong to later hagiography and cannot be confirmed independently. The historical Agrippinus is thus known almost solely through his office and through the cult that formed around his tomb.

The strength of that cult is better documented than the events of his life. He was interred in the cemetery on the hill of Capodimonte that later became the Catacombs of San Gennaro, a complex that also housed the remains of other early Neapolitan bishops. In the ninth century Bishop John IV translated Agrippinus’s relics from the catacombs into the city, depositing them in the basilica of Santa Restituta, then the cathedral church of Naples. At a subsequent date the relics were transferred to the present cathedral, the Duomo, where they are kept in a chapel dedicated to the saint. Throughout the Middle Ages pilgrims and citizens sought healings and other favors at his tomb, and his name remained in the local liturgical books even after the spectacular cult of the blood of Saint Januarius came to dominate Neapolitan devotion.

The Roman Martyrology and the Neapolitan calendar keep the feast of Saint Agrippinus on 9 November. He is honored as one of the patron saints of Naples, a status reflected in the dedication of the church of Sant’Agrippino a Forcella in the historic center. Because the documentary record is so thin, responsible history can affirm little more than that a bishop of this name shepherded the church of Naples in the third century, that his tomb became a focus of veneration from an early period, and that his memory was carefully preserved by translations of relics and by a continuous liturgical cult. Elaborate vitae that supply childhood stories, exact dates, or long catalogues of miracles should be read as expressions of medieval piety rather than as recoverable biography.