Confessor Viator

Saint Viator of Lyons, commemorated in the martyrologies as a confessor, was a cleric of the church of Lyons in Roman Gaul in the later fourth century. He held the office of lector, which in the early Church meant the public reading of Scripture and often the instruction of catechumens. Almost nothing can be established about his family, the place or year of his birth, or the precise chronology of his life. The historical tradition that survives attaches him wholly to Lyons and to the Egyptian exile that followed. He is remembered above all as the companion of Saint Justus, bishop of Lyons, rather than as an independent public figure.

In the later fourth century Bishop Justus became entangled in a serious pastoral crisis. A man accused of crime had taken sanctuary in the church. Under pressure from the civil authority and the crowd, Justus permitted the fugitive to be taken from the church; the prisoner was then put to death. Overcome with remorse at having failed to defend one who had sought the Church’s protection, Justus determined to lay down his see and withdraw from public office. Viator, his lector, chose to go with him. The two left Gaul and traveled to Egypt, then the principal home of Christian monasticism, seeking anonymity among the desert monks rather than episcopal or clerical honor.

Early accounts relate that their identity was in time discovered. Envoys from Lyons, among them a priest named Antiochus who later became bishop of Lyons, found them in the Egyptian desert and tried to persuade Justus to return. Justus refused to take up the episcopate again. He and Viator remained in Egypt until they died, according to the tradition not long after one another, after a life of austerity and prayer. Their relics were subsequently translated to Lyons and enshrined in the basilica associated with the Maccabees, later known as Saint-Just. The Roman Martyrology records Viator on 21 October, noting that the lector followed his bishop into the Egyptian desert and there, after a holy life, rested in the Lord. Lyons also preserved a joint memory of Justus and Viator on other local dates, but 21 October is the feast under which Viator is generally listed.

For many centuries the cult of Saint Viator remained essentially local to Lyons. In the nineteenth century the French priest Louis Querbes placed a newly founded teaching congregation under Viator’s patronage, from which comes the Congregation of the Clerics of Saint Viator (the Viatorians), who honor him as a model of the catechist and of humble clerical service. No reliable source makes him a pope or a patriarch, and none records a wife. The shape of his life as lector and desert monk is that of a celibate cleric of the late antique Church. Beyond the Lyons tradition, the Egyptian sojourn, the translation of relics, and the later Viatorian patronage, few further biographical facts can be verified; even the year of his death is not known with precision and is only placed by later writers near the end of the fourth century.