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Biography

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Saint Pacian (Latin: Pacianus) was bishop of Barcelona in the Roman province of Hispania Tarraconensis during the later fourth century and is counted among the Latin Church Fathers. Nearly everything that can be said about his life with any security depends on a short notice by Saint Jerome in De viris illustribus, written in the early 390s. Jerome described him as a man of chaste eloquence, as distinguished by his manner of life as by his speech, and stated that he died in extreme old age during the reign of the emperor Theodosius I. Pacian therefore belongs to the generation of western bishops who served after the Constantinian settlement, under the Theodosian establishment of Catholic Christianity as the public religion of the empire. No contemporary source records his place or year of birth; later statements that he was born near the beginning of the fourth century are inferences from Jerome’s remark about extreme old age and are not independent evidence. He is known to history as bishop of Barcelona rather than as a monk or member of any later religious order.

Jerome further attests that Pacian was the father of Nummius Aemilianus Dexter, a Roman senator who served as proconsul of Asia and later as praetorian prefect, and to whom Jerome dedicated De viris illustribus. The existence of this son shows that Pacian had been married, which in the fourth-century West remained compatible with episcopal office if marriage had preceded ordination. The name of his wife is not preserved. Nothing reliable is known of his education or of the date at which he became bishop; conventional dates that place the start of his episcopate around the mid-360s are scholarly estimates, not documented appointments. His pastoral horizon was the church of Barcino and the wider Hispanic and western Catholic community, then still dealing with pagan custom, with the memory of the third-century persecutions, and with rigorist Christian sects.

Pacian’s surviving works are pastoral and polemical. Three letters to a Novatianist named Sympronian defend the name and reality of the Catholic Church, the power of the Church to forgive sins after baptism, and the ancient discipline of penance. In the first letter stands the sentence for which he is best remembered: that Christian is his name and Catholic his surname—an assertion that the universal Church, not a congregation of the self-styled pure, is the legitimate heir of the apostles. He also wrote a sermon on baptism and an exhortation to penance (often cited as the Paraenesis or Exhortatorius libellus ad paenitentiam). Jerome mentions a further work called Cervus or Cervulus, now lost, which appears to have attacked the pagan New Year revels of the Kalends of January, in which people donned animal costumes. The extant texts show a bishop occupied with catechesis, with the reconciliation of sinners, and with drawing a clear line between Catholic practice and both Novatian rigorism and lingering pagan festivity.

The Novatianist controversy, which had begun at Rome after the Decian persecution in the mid-third century, still had adherents in Pacian’s Spain. Novatian’s followers denied or severely restricted the Church’s right to reconcile those guilty of grave post-baptismal sin and treated their own community as the true church of the pure. Pacian answered that the Church is called Catholic because it is spread throughout the world and holds the fullness of the faith; that the power of the keys was given to the apostles and their successors; and that the long-standing penitential practice of the churches, including those of Rome and Spain, contradicted sectarian exclusion. His argument rests on Scripture, on received custom, and on the pastoral claim that a church which cannot forgive is not the church of the Gospel. The baptismal sermon complements this teaching by presenting baptism as regeneration and as entry into the one Catholic body, not as a once-for-all certificate of impeccability.

Pacian died in the reign of Theodosius I, traditionally dated to about 390, and almost certainly while still bishop of Barcelona. Jerome, writing shortly afterward, already speaks of him as dead. He has been venerated as a saint in the Latin Church from an early date; the Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 9 March. He was not the object of a formal papal canonization of the later medieval or modern type, and no securely attested burial site or medieval cult with a defined list of patronages is established in the sources. His historical importance lies in Jerome’s testimony, in the small coherent body of writings on penance and Catholic identity, and in his place among the early bishops of Barcelona in the Theodosian age.

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