Valerius of Trier

Valerius of Trier, also called Valerius of Trèves, was a bishop of Trier (the Roman city of Augusta Treverorum) who is traditionally dated to the late third and early fourth centuries. He stands second in the ancient list of bishops of Trier, after Saint Eucharius and before Saint Maternus. He is honoured as a saint in the Catholic Church. Virtually no detail of his life is recorded in sources contemporary with the late Roman period; what is known derives from later medieval legend, from the diocesan tradition of Trier, and from the place assigned to him in the episcopal catalogue.

A legend that took written form by the tenth century, and that was incorporated into the Gesta Treverorum, presents Valerius as one of three missionaries sent by the Apostle Peter from Rome to preach in Gaul. In that story Eucharius was made bishop, Valerius deacon, and Maternus subdeacon. After Maternus died on the journey, his companions returned to Peter, who entrusted them with his pastoral staff; they used it to raise Maternus from the dead, then resumed their mission. Valerius is said to have succeeded Eucharius in the see of Trier. The narrative is historically impossible as a first-century event. It belongs to a common medieval pattern of claiming apostolic foundation for important sees, and it appears to have mixed the early Trier bishops with the historically attested Maternus of Cologne, who was active in the years around the Edict of Milan and who took part in the Council of Arles in 314.

Trier itself was a major imperial city in the Tetrarchic and Constantinian era, and a Christian community there in the later third century is historically plausible. The earliest bishop of Trier documented in a contemporary source is Agricius, a participant at Arles in 314. Eucharius, Valerius, and Maternus occupy the traditional places immediately before him. Modern historians generally accept that Valerius was a genuine early bishop of Trier in the third or early fourth century, while treating the Petrine mission story as pious legend and declining to fix an exact chronology from it. Later martyrologies and compilations commonly give the year 320 as the date of his death; that figure is traditional rather than independently confirmed by fourth-century evidence.

The cult of Valerius has always been linked with that of Eucharius. Relics attributed to the first bishops of Trier have been venerated at the abbey first dedicated to Saint Eucharius and later known as the Abbey of Saint Matthias, outside the Roman walls of Trier. The Roman Martyrology records Valerius on 29 January, still echoing the older description of him as a disciple of Peter and bishop of Trier. In the local usage of the Diocese of Trier he is commemorated together with Eucharius. Like other saints of the early Christian centuries, he was not the object of a formal papal canonization of the kind that developed in the later Middle Ages; his status as a saint rests on continuous local veneration from late antiquity and the early medieval period.