CONCERNING S. LATINUS, BISHOP OF BRESCIA IN ITALY.
BEGINNING OF THE SECOND CENTURY.
PrefaceLatinus, Bishop of Brescia in Italy (S.)
[1] We give this month of March the fourth Saint from among the Bishops of the Church of Brescia, namely Latinus or Flavius Latinus: the others were Titianus, Paul, and Gaudiosus, of whom we treated on the third, fourth, and seventh days of this month of March. Of this one, the Roman Martyrology says: "At Brescia, of S. Latinus the Bishop." Sacred veneration: But Galesinius, citing the Tables of the Saints of the Church of Brescia and the Annals of the city of Bergamo, writes thus in his Martyrology: "At Brescia, of S. Latinus the Bishop, who, being a disciple of the Blessed Viator, succeeding him in the episcopate, was famous for the renown of the deeds he divinely accomplished and for his sanctity; and having religiously administered the Church of Brescia for thirty-one years and more according to God's will, he fell asleep in the Lord." S. Viator is venerated on December 14, and it is commonly reported that he also presided as Bishop over the people of Bergamo, and Ioannes Franciscus Florentinus asserts in his Chronological Index of the Bishops of Brescia, which he published at Brescia in the year 1614, compiled from all antiquity, that Viator departed to the Lord in the year 88, and then adds: "S. Latinus held the episcopate for thirty-one years and more: Time of his see, thirty-one years? during the persecution of the Emperor Domitian, he endured the harshest things for Christ. He dedicated a cemetery on the Cremona road, where the church of S. Afra now stands, for the burial of Martyrs; and he himself was buried there... Our Church observes his anniversary on the ninth day before the Kalends of April." Bernard Faynus in his four compendious Catalogues of the Church of Brescia, published at Brescia in the year 1658, attributes the same number of years of administration to his episcopate, and writes on page 18: "IV. S. Latinus of Brescia. To him S. Viator, failing with old age, yielded the Presidency of the Church of Brescia in the year 84. He rested in the Lord at Brescia on March 24, around the year 115, in the pontificate of Evaristus and the reign of Trajan. His body is venerated with fitting devotion in the church of S. Afra at its own altar." The said year of Christ 115 was the sixth of Pope Evaristus and the eighteenth of the Emperor Trajan.
[2] Or only of three years and seven months. But Baronius in his Notes on the Roman Martyrology and Ughellus in volume 4 of Italia Sacra on the Bishops of Brescia oppose an ancient inscription unearthed by Aldus Manutius and published in his Orthography in the year 1566, where on page 589 one reads: "TO FL. LATINUS BISHOP, 3 YEARS 7 MONTHS, PRIEST 15 YEARS, EXORCIST 12 YEARS. AND TO LATINILLA AND FL. MACRIANUS LECTOR, FL. PAULINA HIS GRANDDAUGHTER SET UP THIS MONUMENT WELL-DESERVING." Baronius calls it a noble monument of antiquity, in which the ecclesiastical functions of this same Latinus are described. Ferrarius in his Notes on the Catalogue of the Saints of Italy doubts whether this inscription pertains to this S. Latinus. In the Brescia Martyrology (which we know was composed after the year 1597, from the eulogy of S. Oliva, Virgin and Martyr, published by us for March 5) one reads thus for this day: "At Brescia, the Feast of S. Latinus the Bishop, manner of death: who by order of the Emperor Domitian was crowned with martyrdom together with many of the faithful for the name of Christ, having sat in the episcopate three years and seven months. His holy body is kept in the Church of SS. Faustinus and Jovita at the Blood, or of S. Afra." So says the said manuscript Martyrology, which we have obtained through the gift of Ferdinandus Ughellus; but we gather that it is not of the highest authority from the cited Florentinus and Faynus, who wrote afterward at Brescia and dedicated their treatises to the Bishops of Brescia: the former to Marino Giorgio, the latter to Cardinal Peter Otthoboni; who nevertheless ascribe thirty-one years of the See to S. Latinus and assert that he rested in the Lord, though Faynus adds on page 9 that he was also called a Martyr.
[3] The aforementioned Florentinus adds that the relics of S. Latinus, discovered in the year 1466 in a stone coffin, discovery and translation of the body, were placed in a chapel of the same church nearest to the high altar; and in the year 1624 were placed in a new altar in the upper church to the left of the high altar. Ughellus also indicates the same in fewer words. Bishop Brautius adorns him with this distich:
"By the example of his life and sacred charm, Latinus drew the gentle sheep into the fold of Christ."
LIFE
From the Italian of Ascanio Martinengo.
Latinus, Bishop of Brescia in Italy (S.)
[4] Latinus, the fourth Bishop of Brescia, was called by his proper name Flavius, Latinus piously and nobly educated, if that most noble vestige of antiquity, so highly praised by Aldus and Baronius, pertains to him -- as should be believed on this account: that no mention of another Bishop Latinus is found anywhere. What names his parents had, what their family, what their religion, is unknown: yet we may suspect that he imbibed piety with his very milk, and was nobly educated, he who was to govern the Church with such piety and authority. When his teacher Viator was transferred to the See of Bergamo. It profited him, moreover, in the first slippery period of youthful age, to have had Viator as his teacher, a holy man, from whom the teachable disciple could receive the most sincere doctrines of the orthodox faith and the most perfect examples of Christian virtues. Not very long afterward it happened that Viator was transferred from the See of Brescia to that of Bergamo, and this, as Benalius writes in his first book of Antiquities, in the year of Christ's nativity 75: nor did he believe that in those most calamitous times he could establish in his place a better Pastor for the afflicted flock than Latinus, although the latter, as we must suppose, from innate modesty and the gravity of the office itself, was exceedingly reluctant to take so great a burden upon his shoulders.
[5] Made Bishop of Brescia. And indeed a horrible persecution was soon stirred up by Domitian
a storm, by which the Christian Church, breathing more securely under the indulgence of the Emperors Vespasian and Titus from the heat of the Neronian persecution, was again beset by new tempests: how great were the labors these brought upon Latinus is not easy to express in words. Yet the unconquered patience of the man prevailed, and he made such progress he labors excellently in a time of persecution that not only were the fearful and fleeing confirmed to take up the palm of martyrdom through exquisite kinds of torments, and even to seek it eagerly; but also very many of the unbelievers themselves, taught the truth by him, abjured the worship of idols, and the new flock, growing up in manifold increase, filled the sheepfolds emptied by so many slaughters.
[6] in preaching the faith all around: That this succeeded more happily for Latinus than for any of his predecessor bishops was due to the length of his pontificate: for those whose eyes the more violent flash of truth, striking them unexpectedly, had in a manner stupefied, or whose slow steps toward the heights of virtue the allurements of pleasures had entangled in a more tenacious snare -- these the gentle modesty of patient virtue gradually softened and corrected: and the unceasing vigilance of the holy bishop, made more practiced by the very exercise of rooting out the tares, allowed no bad seed to grow up that might impede the increase of good fruit. Then going around the villages and hamlets, he strove to bring back the superstitious minds of even the rural populace to the way of truth, he suffers much: suffering much on this account from the uncultivated savagery of these men; which the devil, provoking by his arts, avenged as he could the damage inflicted by Latinus on his realm; when, not content to threaten insults, reproaches, blows, chains and even imprisonment, he also inflicted the same as far as he was able, and at the same time adorned the crown of his endurance with as many precious gems.
[7] And this apostolic man was most eager to shed his blood for the faith, worn by age he seeks hiding places, for whom a new persecution that had arisen seemed about to give the opportunity: but it seemed otherwise to the Deity, and he commanded that in his declining age he withdraw himself from the fury of the tyrants by a prudent flight, until the Arbiter of life and death, about to put an end to his pilgrimage, should lead him forth from this mortal life. He had therefore to obey the command, although it was most grievous for the excellent father to be torn from his children, placed in such great distress; nor could the most faithful pastor be absent from his flock without the greatest anguish of soul, while wolves ravaged the sheepfolds. Withdrawn, however, among the recesses of the mountains, with a small number of the most proven clergy, from those hiding places he fought as he could; persisting in fasts, vigils, and prayers, and with these spiritual weapons he defended the cause of the Church, while others fought for the same in open battle.
[8] While he was doing these things, not much time elapsed before his approaching death was divinely revealed to him. where he understands that death is imminent for him, Having therefore summoned the companions of his flight and the sharers of his hiding places, such children as he could call together, he announced the swift laying aside of his tabernacle; consoling them with gentle words and raising all to the hope of future goods, which they knew were stored up for those who persevere to the end. When the eighteenth day of March arrived, the final illness also arrived: it seemed slight at first, but within six days it increased to such a degree that, the moderate remaining strength being exhausted, it brought a death most like sleep, so peacefully did he expire, that his passing would almost have escaped the eyes of those standing by, had not a brightness suddenly seen on his face turned them to attention and struck them at once, and he dies illustriously with heavenly prodigies, as ancient records concerning him attest. Even after his spirit had departed to heaven, his body, a chosen vessel of all virtues, exhaled a wonderful fragrance to all: which many miracles followed, in succeeding years preserving for posterity the fresh memory of the departed Father; since many repeatedly hastened to his holy tomb, seeking medicine for diseases and solace for their troubles.
[9] Latinus departed, at a quite advanced age, to the better life, after 31 years in the episcopate. after he had governed the Church of Brescia for thirty-one years and more, as the tradition of that same Church and the Martyrology of Galesinius record: nor are there lacking those who write that, having been made Bishop in the year of Christ eighty-eight, he prolonged his life until the hundred and sixteenth or nineteenth year. But calculations of this sort, which have been reckoned without any authority and proper foundation, buried by Apollonius in S. Afra: circulated concerning the successions of the Bishops of Brescia, are not to be examined too rigidly: and it is far better to pass over these and observe how his sacred body was secretly buried by S. Apollonius, likewise a disciple and successor of Latinus, with a greater abundance of tears than funeral pomp, in that place where the bodies of very many Martyrs slain for Christ had been laid, on the Cremona road not far from the city. To which place afterwards many others, who died in a similar cause of religion, were brought; and indeed by that very Apollonius whom we mentioned, not very long afterward, the most holy Martyrs Faustinus and Jovita: under whose invocation a church is now seen there, called by the more recent name of S. Afra.
[10] The choir of this church was restored in the year of our salvation 1533, in whose restoration and the rest of the temple in the year of our salvation 1580: before which was done, there was in the southern chapel, smaller than the main one, a little chapel dedicated to this Saint. When workmen were demolishing its altar, because it was judged to obstruct considerably the proper arrangement of the whole place, they found under it a stone coffin, in the year 1464 the body was found, well sealed, upon which lay a slab of the same material, fastened and consolidated with lead, having inscribed on it an image of S. Latinus and this inscription: IN THE YEAR 1464 IT WAS PLACED HERE, without further expression of the manner and place where the sacred bones had previously been placed. Then in the year 1576, in the same place another chapel was built, under the name of the same Saint, in the year 1576 again stored away. and that very coffin was placed under the altar there; as can even now be seen through a grating, fitted to an opening made for that purpose. On the front of the chapel itself is seen a stone tablet, containing an inscribed image of the Saint: crude indeed, but venerable by its very antiquity, and the more so because pious credulity has commonly persuaded that this is his true likeness. So says Martinengo, an eyewitness of the latter narrative in the very church in whose monastery he lived as abbot, A briefer eulogy in Ferrarius: in the Lives of SS. Faustinus, Jovita, and Afra and other Saints of Brescia, published in the common tongue in the year 1602: which things, more verbosely amplified there with the ornament of rhetorical amplification, we have here contracted into a few words; but they can be read much more briefly still in the Catalogue of the Saints of Italy by Ferrarius. He concludes, moreover, by quoting verbatim the stone inscription produced above, and explains it thus, Was the inscription set up by his granddaughter while he was still alive? that he judges it not to be an epitaph but a monument, set up for him while still living, after three years and seven months spent in the episcopate, by his granddaughter, as a token of love and honor: and from this he infers that (since the grade of Presbyterate was not usually conferred before the thirtieth year of age) the man for whom this stone was set up, in the fifteenth year of his Presbyterate, the twelfth of the grade of Exorcist, as is said (for that the authority of exorcising was customarily conferred separately from the Presbyterate is known from the Life of S. Martin), and who then survived so long as Bishop, must have reached beyond the seventy-third year of age. Which things we have no intention either of rejecting or of confirming by assent: since the numbers of years that are commonly attached to the first names of episcopal catalogues (to speak not of the Brescians alone with Martinengo) are for the most part devised without proper foundation by those who presumed to define from their own conjecture times circumscribed by no certain limits, equally as in their successors. Whom we tolerate to the extent that they are not refuted by any ancient monuments: as the longevity of Latinus in the episcopate seems to some to be undermined by the testimony of this stone, among whom is the author of the Brescian Martyrology.