ON SAINT URSICINUS
BISHOP OF TICINUM IN ITALY
ABOUT CCXVI
His elogia in more recent style received from Pavia
Ursicinus, Bishop of Ticinum, in Italy (S.)
G. H.
The Tables of the Roman Martyrology on this XXI June celebrate the memory of S. Ursicinus, Bishop and Confessor of Pavia. Sacred cultus. Galesinius adds: Who shining with piety, clemency, and mercy in the Episcopal office, with life holily acted, and the Episcopate piously administered to the will of God, rested in the Lord: about whom Ferdinand Ughelli in the first tome of Italia sacra among the Bishops of Pavia writes these things: Seventh S. Ursicinus, flourished in sanctity in the year CLXXXIII, and died in the year CCXVI on the day XXI of the month of June, whose sacred Relics rest in the church of S. John of the Marsh, or in the cemetery of the Borgo. We were at Pavia in the year MDCLXII, and inquiring about the Saints of Pavia, we received, as a gift from the venerable Presbyter John Baptist de Gasparis, the Breviary of the Life of the Saints of the Bishops of the Ticinensian Church, edited by him into light, and praised by others: in which about S. Ursicinus he has these things. Compendium of the Life, Ursicinus, illustrious of Ticinum, from his first age gave more illustrious signs of wonderful probity. As an adolescent enrolled in Ecclesiastical militia, by notable preeminence of morals and the highest erudition he surpassed the rest: subduing his body most harshly, the same he reduced into servitude. Having attained the Episcopal throne, he was a beneficent Father. Strenuously laboring for the salvation of his citizens with assiduous Pastoral zeal, he wonderfully illustrated his Church. He cultivated the City with such great virtues, that infidels on account of the wonderful religion of the people flocking there, and excited by the beauty of virtues, with the impure superstition of idols left, both in body and soul betook themselves into the society of the faithful. Most studious of poverty, he distributed his patrimony to the poor. This was his familiar saying: He who seeks or embraces more riches, is subjected to more enemies. When he himself the Bishop of illustrious ingenuity, of wonderful sanctity, of virtue and grace most prompt to mercy, piety, clemency, had holily and religiously administered the people and church with the greatest benevolence of all most uprightly for thirty-three years, with the ergastulum of body left to the kingdoms of the heavens he happily flew, on the eleventh Kalends of July, in the year two hundred sixteen, and was buried with the exquisite honor of a funeral. His body however is religiously kept in S. John of the Marsh or of the cemetery, or, as is now said, in the Borgo. Thus there. Are cited Gualla, Breventanus, Spelta, writers of Pavia; Ferrari in the Catalogue of Saints of Italy, and a few others: who all would have better consulted their history, if they had indicated the older monuments from which they took such things: now we doubt, whether they have transmitted more than the name of the ancient: to which the pious simplicity of a higher age added elogia, such as could befit any holy Bishop, who lived under Gentilism, and so Rhetoricians rather than Historians wrote these things for us.