ON ST. CHRESTUS THE BISHOP,
AT SYRACUSE IN SICILY.
From Ottavio Gaetani.
Section I.
CommentaryChrestus, Bishop, at Syracuse in Sicily (S.)
J. B. S.
Philip Ferrari, in his second Catalogue of the Saints who are not in the Roman Martyrology, thus reads on this day in the next-to-last place: At Syracuse in Sicily, St. Chrestus the Bishop, citing in his notes the tables of the Church of Syracuse and the Sicilian Martyrology; The first notice of this Saint and he says that he lived under Vespasian and rested in peace. Ferrari, who published that catalogue in 1625, drew these things from the Sicilian Martyrology of our Ottavio Gaetani, published in 1617, in which we find: At Syracuse, St. Chrestus, Bishop and confessor, under the Emperor Vespasian, with the manuscript codices and the tables of Syracuse cited in the margin. But what may astonish you, those writers make mutual use of one another's work; for Gaetani, in his great work on the lives of the Sicilian Saints, published after his death in the year 1657, adduces Ferrari himself in these words: Philip Ferrari, in his Catalogue of the Saints under the third day of July, makes mention of St. Chrestus the Bishop, and adds that he rested in peace, etc., as you will presently see. Gaetani asserts that there were other prelates of Syracuse by the name of Chrestus; but in the Scobar Catalogue, in our possession in manuscript, only our own kinsman and successor is recorded. This much is certain: nothing of the deeds of St. Chrestus is anywhere to be found; but that his cult obtained long ago among the Syracusans, we believe on the faith of Gaetani, and we give what he himself set down concerning the Saint in volume 1, page 19, in this manner.
[2] Martyrs beneath the altars St. Chrestus, Bishop of the Church of Syracuse, was a disciple of Blessed Marcian, the first Bishop of Syracuse. As Marcian was put to death for the faith, so Chrestus himself succeeded in his place. He met a death in keeping with his life, and was laid beneath the sacred table, as the annals of the pontiffs of Syracuse (understand the Scobar catalogue) teach; the rest we do not know. Philip Ferrari, in the Catalogue of the Saints under the third day of July, makes mention of St. Chrestus the Bishop, and adds that he rested in peace. But although nothing certain can be brought forward concerning his martyrdom, I will offer a conjecture of blood poured out for Christ. We have said that the body of Chrestus was laid away beneath the sacred table, and that an altar is there to be understood, no one, I think, will doubt; but that altars were the sepulchers of the Martyrs, John the Apostle demonstrates in the Apocalypse, and so does the ancient custom of the infant Church. And with this in view Cyprian, in his praise of martyrdom, says: That sacred altar enfolds you within itself; that great seat of the venerable name encloses you within itself, as though within a certain bosom of an embracing lap.
[3] Augustine indeed explains the matter more brilliantly, speaking of the Martyrs. buried in this manner from every age. See, he says, what place they merit among men, who have merited a place beneath the altar in the sight of God. For the sacred Scripture says: I saw beneath the altar of God the souls of those slain for the word of God. What can be said more reverent, what more honorable, than to rest beneath that altar on which sacrifice is celebrated to God? And soon after: Rightly do the souls of the just rest beneath the altar, because upon the altar the body of the Lord is offered. Fittingly, therefore, and as though for a kind of fellowship, burial was there decreed to the Martyrs, where the death of the Lord is daily celebrated, as He Himself says: As often as you shall do these things, you shall announce my death until I come; namely, that those who died for the sake of His death may rest beneath the mystery of His Sacrament. Not undeservedly, I say, by a certain fellowship is a tomb established for the slain there, where the members of the Lord's slaying are laid, so that those whom the one cause had bound together with Christ, the sanctity of one place might also join together.
[4] Other bishops of Syracuse by the name of Chrestus. There were also in the Church of Syracuse other prelates distinguished by the name of Chrestus, whom I would not wish to furnish occasion for error. One indeed flourished under Constantine, to whom that emperor wrote a letter, that he should go with two other Sicilian Bishops, whom he himself had chosen, to Arles to the council, as Baronius reports for the year of Christ 314. But he is separated from St. Chrestus, of whom we speak, by a long interval of time. Nearer to him is another Chrestus, who is said to have been his brother, and to have succeeded him in the episcopate of Syracuse, by Cassian, a Sicilian, I suppose, historian, whom Scobar reports in the Catalogue of the prelates of Syracuse. But that a brother should have succeeded a brother ought to seem no wonder, since even Paul was substituted for his own brother Stephen in the Roman pontificate, according to Anastasius the Librarian; and other examples abound in the histories. At Syracuse Chrestus is venerated on the third of July; but the vicissitudes of affairs and the injuries of the times have obscured both the veneration and the memory of this most holy man. O the fate of a fatherland, that such a citizen, such a man, should lie in the shadows!