ON SAINT CARUS, BISHOP AND MARTYR,
AT ATINA IN ITALY.
ABOUT THE YEAR 249.
HISTORICAL COMMENTARY.
Carus, Bishop and Martyr, at Atina in Italy (St.)
D. P.
[1] The anonymous authors of the Chronicle of Atina, published by Ferdinand Ughelli after volume 1 of Italia Sacra from a very ancient manuscript codex of the monastery of Fossanova, and continued up to the year 1355, introduce mention of Saint Carus, eighth bishop of that city, with these words: Affection toward the body of Saint Mark is his martyrdom, "Pontianus in the last year of his Pontificate ordained in the city of Atina Carus as bishop, who sat twenty-two years, three months, twenty-two days. Who, when he was occupied in prayer with certain of the faithful, beside the body of Blessed Mark, for a certain demoniac, the pagans rushing in killed him. His blood leaping upon the demoniac, he frees one possessed, immediately this man was cleansed. Moreover, he was buried there on the third of the Kalends of May." So it reads there: more and more authentic things have been denied to us by wicked men, by whom, as is read in the History of the Discovery and Translation of Saint Mark, published on the preceding day, the ancient church of Saint Mark was devastated and reduced to the ground.
[2] Ughelli, the aforementioned, transferred the words of the Chronicle into volume 6 of Italia Sacra, and Philip Ferrarius had only these before his eyes in his catalogue of the Saints of Italy on this day, he is counted among the Protectors of the city, citing the monuments of the Church of Atina, and the book of Pietro Paolo Florio of Urbino concerning the Saints who are Protectors of Atina; nor does the Italian manuscript booklet about these same men suggest more, of which mention was made on April 1 when we were treating of Saint Prudentius; only the prayer "Our infirmity" is added, taken from the Common of a Martyr-Pontiff; from which and from other things said there we suspect that it is not a very ancient custom at Atina to venerate the same Bishop by the recitation of the ecclesiastical office. Moreover, Ferrarius must have read the aforementioned chronicle with others' eyes, when he wrote that Saint Prudentius administered the church of Atina after Saint Carus: for in it is read that between each Vigilantius mediated. If the characters of time noted in the chronicle were indubitable, Carus would have held the See of Atina from the year 237 to 259: how long he held the see is not entirely certain: but then his successor Vigilantius would have been substituted by Pope Stephen not in the first year, as the chronicle says, but in the third and last year of his Pontificate: moreover, there would be a greater difficulty in Dimitrius, predecessor of Carus, who according to the same Chronicle, ordained in the first year of Calixtus, would have held the episcopacy for 31 or 38 years, and so could not have made room for his successor Carus before the year 242 or 249. Having noted this, Ughelli holds (in his Bishops of Atina, where for Carus he writes Corus) that the series of them can scarcely be corrected, namely, if it is compared with the Roman Pontificates incorrectly noted.
[3] If however you either subtract ten years from the aforementioned Dimitrius, and restrict to sixteen the years of his prolonged blindness in extreme old age, or conceive that Carus presided for only ten years (for it was easy for numbers in one place or another to be corrupted by a scribe by the addition of one decade), it will perhaps not be so difficult to reconcile with true chronology that very series of the Bishops of Atina which we have mentioned: on account of the added years of the Roman Pontiffs. provided you note that the authors of the Chronicle calculated the years of the Roman Pontiffs from the chronicle of Eusebius, and transferred them and the names of the same Pontiffs to the ordinations of their own bishops, just as the number of years assigned to each bishop in the older monuments required. From which however it follows, that of their own they supplied the notice under which Pontiff each Bishop was ordained: perhaps even gratuitously assuming that it was always done by a Roman Pontiff. Ferrarius in the general Catalogue refers the same Saint Carus to April 19 of this month: citing both there and in this place in the other Catalogue the tables of the Church of Atina. To this day April 29 the same man Nicholas Brautius, Bishop of Sarsina, honors him with this distich:
"Carus, consecrated by the highest Pontiff, at the altars Fell for Christ, slain like a lamb."