Eusebius of Vercelli

Eusebius was born in Sardinia about 283, taken to Rome as a child after his father died, and served there as a lector. Around 345 he was made the first bishop of Vercelli, in the Piedmont plain of northern Italy. He did something in that office that had not been done in the West: he had his clergy live together in community, under a common discipline, like monks. Priests in a city, sharing a table and a rule of prayer, was an Eastern idea, and Eusebius planted it in Italy. Ambrose praised the arrangement; it became a model, and much later the pattern of canons regular traced itself back to him. In 355 the emperor Constantius summoned a council at Milan and demanded that the bishops sign the condemnation of Athanasius. Eusebius did not want to come. When he did, he refused to discuss Athanasius until the assembly first affirmed the faith, and he laid the Nicene Creed on the table and asked every bishop present to sign that before anything else. Dionysius of Milan reached for the pen; the Arian party stopped him; the meeting collapsed into shouting. Constantius eventually summoned the bishops into the palace and threatened them. Eusebius still refused. He was exiled — first to Scythopolis in Palestine, where the local Arian bishop Patrophilus had him seized, dragged through the streets, and kept in close confinement until he nearly starved; then to Cappadocia; then to the Thebaid in Upper Egypt. Three of his letters from exile survive, including one to his congregation at Vercelli, and they are among the most vivid firsthand accounts of what a bishop's banishment actually involved. Julian's amnesty released him in 362. He did not go straight home. He went to Alexandria, took part with Athanasius in the council held there that year, and then travelled through the East and through Illyricum working to reconcile churches split by the long controversy, before returning to Italy and joining Hilary of Poitiers in the campaign against the Arian bishop Auxentius of Milan. Tradition credits him with the Codex Vercellensis, the oldest surviving manuscript of the Old Latin gospels, still kept at Vercelli. He died there in 371. Sources: Eusebius of Vercelli, Letters; Jerome, On Illustrious Men, 96; Ambrose of Milan, Letter 63; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "St. Eusebius of Vercelli".