Maternien

Saint Maternien, known in Latin as Maternianus and sometimes appearing in French sources as Materne, was a bishop of Reims in Roman Gaul during the fourth century. He belongs to the early, thinly documented succession of that see. The principal narrative source for the first bishops of Reims is the tenth-century Historia Remensis ecclesiae of Flodoard of Reims, who includes Maternianus in the episcopal catalogue after Saint Aper (Aprus) and among the occupants of the see in the generations that followed the Peace of the Church and preceded the episcopate of Saint Nicasius in the early fifth century. No contemporary letters, sermons, or conciliar acts can be securely attributed to him, and his historical profile is therefore that of a name in the local list of bishops around whom a later liturgical cult formed.

Almost nothing reliable is known of his birth, family, or education. Later Reims tradition presented him as a native of the city who rose through its clergy to the episcopate, but this is not confirmed by early evidence, and no year of birth is recorded. Dates of death that appear in some modern saint directories, occasionally given as around 368, are likewise unsupported by contemporary documentation and should be regarded as conjectural. He is not known to have belonged to a monastic order. Like other Gallic bishops of the fourth century he would have been drawn from the secular clergy of his church. Whether he was married, a possibility that had not yet been uniformly excluded for Western bishops, is unrecorded, as is any information about children.

His cult is that of an early local bishop rather than of a saint surrounded by an elaborate legendary cycle. He was venerated at Reims, and in the liturgical tradition of that church his feast came to be kept on 30 October. Relics associated with him were preserved in Reims during the Middle Ages; later local historians mention the early bishops in connection with the city’s churches, although precise and consistent details of his original burial place and of any subsequent translations are lacking. He was never the subject of a formal papal canonization of the later medieval or modern type. Recognition of his sanctity belongs to the ancient, pre-congregational cult of a holy bishop of the local church.

Maternien is easily confused with Saint Maternus of Cologne, the better-known missionary bishop associated in Rhineland tradition with Trier, Cologne, and Tongeren. The similarity of the names Maternus, Maternianus, Maternien, and Materne has led calendars and secondary notices at times to conflate the two men. They are distinct: Maternus of Cologne belongs to the early fourth-century apostolic tradition of the Rhine, whereas Maternien belongs to the internal succession of the church of Reims. Maternien was not Bishop of Rome and did not hold a patriarchal or catholicosal see. No well-attested patronages of places, professions, illnesses, or social groups are attached to his name beyond the local memory of Reims, whose principal patron in later centuries was Saint Remigius.

In the fourth century the church of Reims was consolidating Christian life in Belgica after the Constantinian settlement. Bishops of Maternien’s generation would have been concerned with preaching, the discipline of clergy and laity, care of the poor, the maintenance of church buildings, and communion with other churches of Gaul. Later historians of Reims included him among the holy predecessors of Saint Remigius, thereby writing him into the sacred history of a see that became one of the foremost churches of Frankish and medieval France. Modern scholarship treats the earliest Reims episcopal list with caution, yet it remains reasonable to accept that a bishop named Maternianus governed the see in the fourth century and that a liturgical cult subsequently attached to his memory. The paucity of evidence is itself characteristic of many Gallic bishops of this period, whose names survive in catalogues and martyrologies rather than in a full biographical dossier.