Suggest an Edit — Confessor Peter Chrysologus

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Biography

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Peter Chrysologus, whose Greek epithet means golden-worded, was bishop of Ravenna in the fifth century and is remembered for short, theologically dense homilies. He was born at Imola, the ancient Forum Cornelii, in the Emilia region of northern Italy. Later compilers give conflicting years for his birth, and no contemporary document records it with certainty, so the date remains unknown. He was trained among the clergy of Imola and ordained deacon by Bishop Cornelius of that city.

A later tradition, preserved in the ninth-century Book of the Pontiffs of the Church of Ravenna by Agnellus, states that Pope Sixtus III appointed him bishop of Ravenna about 433 after a vision in which Saint Peter and the martyr Apollinaris indicated the deacon of Imola rather than the candidate elected by the local clergy. Ravenna was then the residence of the Western imperial court. Peter worked in close association with the empress Galla Placidia and is associated with the dedication of several churches in the city, including a church of Saint John the Evangelist founded in fulfillment of an imperial vow.

A collection of sermons, of which 176 are generally accepted as authentic, forms his surviving literary work. The homilies are characteristically brief and treat Gospel pericopes, the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and feast days. They insist on the reality of the Incarnation, the authority of the Roman see, and the rejection of Arian and other heterodox Christologies. In 448 he addressed an extant letter to the Constantinopolitan archimandrite Eutyches, urging him to submit to Pope Leo and to Flavian of Constantinople rather than persist in his teaching; the letter is an important Western witness to the Eutychian controversy before the Council of Chalcedon.

According to tradition he died at Imola while visiting his native city, on 31 July in or about the year 450. His cult is attested in the early Middle Ages. The Roman liturgy formerly kept his feast on 4 December; it is now observed on 30 July. In 1729 Pope Benedict XIII declared him a Doctor of the Church. He is venerated as a patron of Imola and remembered as a preacher who combined doctrinal orthodoxy with pastoral brevity in the last decades of the Western Empire.

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