ON ST. VERUS, OR VIRUS, BISHOP OF VIENNE IN GAUL.
Circa A.D. 594.
CommentaryVerus, Bishop of Vienne in Gaul (St.)
From various sources.
[1] Three Bishops named Verus administered the Church of Vienne. The first is traditionally held to have lived in the time of Trajan and is venerated on August 1. The second was present at the First Council of Arles (not the Second, as Baronius writes in his Notes on the Martyrology) in the year of Christ 314. Three Bishops of Vienne named Verus. The third flourished in the time of Childebert, the son of Sigebert, and is venerated on January 13, although Jean Boscius in the Floriac Library and Jean Chenu write that he died on the 10th before the Kalends of June — on which day we find his name in no Martyrology.
[2] The feast of the third. But on the Ides of January, Ado, the printed Bede, Molanus and the Carthusians of Cologne in their Additions to Usuard, the Florarium, the German Martyrology, and various manuscripts have this: "At Vienne, St. Verus the Bishop, who presided over the Church after St. Euantius." Galesin also records him, and Saussay with a more extended eulogy. The Cologne Martyrology and the manuscript Brussels Martyrology call him Severus; Ferrari calls him Vir, as does Gregory of Tours. Claude Robert, Boscius, and Chenu use both Verus and Vir, and place him as the twenty-seventh Bishop of that city; Demochar makes him the twenty-sixth. Ferrari considers this to be the same person who is venerated on August 1.
[3] His episcopate. Concerning him, St. Gregory of Tours writes in the History of the Franks, book 8, chapter 39: "Euantius, Bishop of Vienne, also died" (in the year, as he had said a little before, of Childebert II — which was the year of Christ 586), "and Virus, a Presbyter of senatorial rank, was substituted in his see by the King's choice." We shall treat of St. Euantius on February 3. Boscius and Chenu err when they write that he sat under the Emperors Tiberius and then Maurice, since Tiberius died on August 14 of the year 582. Under St. Verus, St. Desiderius was a Deacon of the Church of Vienne. So Ado writes in his Chronicle, under the reign of Maurice: "Verus, Bishop of Vienne, flourished. In his time Desiderius, of the people of Autun by birth, served the Church of Vienne in the order of the diaconate."
[4] Baronius, in his Notes on the Martyrology under August 1, says that letters of St. Gregory the Pope written to St. Verus survive. We have not yet seen them. The time of his tenure. There survive letters addressed to St. Desiderius, his successor, dated in the month of July, Indiction 14, the year of Christ 596 — from which it is established that St. Verus had died before that date. Saussay writes that he was glorified in his tomb by conspicuous signs of the glory Miracles. which the Blessed one enjoys. We have found nothing else concerning him.