Leander

Saint Leander of Seville was a Hispano-Roman bishop of the sixth century, born at Cartagena in southeastern Hispania into a family of senatorial or official rank. Early sources name his father Severianus as a provincial of Carthaginensis. Leander was the brother of Saint Isidore of Seville, who later occupied the same see; of Saint Fulgentius, bishop of Ecija; and of Saint Florentina, a nun for whom he later wrote a treatise on the virginal life. Disturbances in the southeast—where Visigothic power and the Byzantine province of Spania contended for Cartagena and its coast—led the family to settle in Seville. There Leander entered a monastery while still a young man, following a pattern of aristocratic asceticism well attested in sixth-century Spain.

He was raised from the cloister to the metropolitan see of Seville in the later sixth century, during the reign of the Arian Visigothic king Leovigild. As bishop he became a principal Catholic opponent of court Arianism. He is associated with the conversion of Leovigild’s son Hermenegild, whose rebellion and death (commonly placed in the 580s) Gregory the Great later treated as martyrdom. Leander himself suffered exile. During that exile he went to Constantinople, ostensibly in connection with Hermenegild’s appeal to the empire, and there formed a friendship with Gregory, then papal apocrisiarius. After Gregory became pope he corresponded with Leander, dedicated to him the Moralia in Job, and sent him the pallium.

Leander’s lasting political-religious achievement was the conversion of King Reccared and the Visigothic kingdom to Catholic Christianity. At the Third Council of Toledo in 589, Reccared and the Visigothic episcopate professed the Nicene faith; Leander was a leading figure at the council and delivered a homily on the Church’s triumph over heresy that is still extant. He laboured on the Hispanic liturgy, and is traditionally credited with introducing the public recitation of the Nicene Creed at Mass in Spain in order to implant Trinitarian doctrine. His surviving treatise De institutione virginum et contemptu mundi, addressed to Florentina, offers a window on female monastic formation in Baetica. Little else of his literary work remains complete.

He died at Seville at the turn of the seventh century, on a date the martyrologies give as 13 March, in 600 or 601. His brother Isidore succeeded him and inherited an episcopal programme of orthodoxy, education, and liturgical order. Veneration of Leander is early and continuous in Spain; the General Roman Calendar keeps his feast on 13 March, while some Spanish local calendars have observed 27 February. He is remembered as the bishop who reconciled the Visigothic kingdom to the Catholic Church, as a correspondent of Gregory the Great, and as the elder of the Cartagena siblings whose sanctity marked the Church of Seville.