Maternus

Saint Maternus, known in Italian as Materno, was bishop of Milan in the early fourth century. Traditional catalogues of the Milanese episcopate assign him a tenure from about 316 until about 328. In that reconstruction he succeeded Saint Mirocles, who had taken part in the Council of Rome in 313 and the Council of Arles in 314, and was followed by Saint Protasius. No inscription, letter, or conciliar subscription from Maternus’s own lifetime has survived, and the exact years of his birth, election, and death are not confirmed by contemporary fourth-century documents. His place in the succession rests on the medieval Catalogus archiepiscoporum Mediolanensium and on the liturgical memory of the Ambrosian church.

Nothing reliable is recorded of his family, birthplace, education, or career before he became bishop. Later tradition has sometimes presented him as an opponent of Arianism. The Council of Nicaea met in 325, during the years usually given for his episcopate, yet there is no evidence that Maternus attended that council or issued any statement on the Trinitarian controversy. Any picture of his theology therefore remains a later inference rather than a documented fact. In his lifetime the Christian community of Milan was consolidating its public position after the Constantinian settlement, and the bishop of the city was already a figure of regional standing, though the see had not yet acquired the prestige it would enjoy under Ambrose later in the same century.

Milanese tradition holds that Maternus was buried in the cemetery of Saint Calimerus, which later became the Basilica of San Calimero. In 1571 Archbishop Charles Borromeo translated the relics attributed to him into the cathedral of Milan, the Duomo, where they have continued to be venerated. His cult is primarily local. The Ambrosian calendars commemorate him on 18 July. He is honoured as a saint in the Catholic Church through the ancient cultus of the early bishops of Milan; no formal papal canonization of the later medieval or modern type is recorded.

Because the sources are so few, a biography of Maternus can only be a cautious reconstruction from later catalogues and from the general history of the church of Milan in the Constantinian age. He belongs to the series of pre-Ambrosian bishops whose names were preserved for liturgical commemoration and for the continuity of the see, but whose personal deeds, writings, and circumstances have not come down to us.