Faustinus of Lyon

Faustinus became bishop of Lyons in Gaul around the year 250, in the middle of the Decian persecution. The record of his life is thin. What survives is a single episode, and it is the kind that shows a man. South of him, at Arles, sat a bishop named Marcianus who had gone over to Novatian. The Novatianists held that Christians who had sacrificed under persecution could never be readmitted to communion — not after penance, not after years, not on their deathbeds. Marcianus applied it. Men and women in his diocese who had cracked under torture or bought a certificate to save their families came back weeping and were turned away, and went on being turned away as they died. Faustinus could see it and could not stop it; a bishop had no authority over another bishop's diocese. So he wrote. He wrote to Cyprian at Carthage and he wrote to Stephen, the bishop of Rome, and when nothing happened he wrote again. Other bishops of the province wrote too. Cyprian's reply survives, and it names him: Faustinus our colleague, abiding at Lyons, has written to me once and again, dearest brother. Cyprian then wrote to Stephen directly and told him, in plain words, to act — to send letters into Gaul, to have Marcianus excommunicated and a successor put in his place, so that the flock of Christ scattered and wounded by him could be gathered again. He pressed the point that the whole reason Christ gave the church authority to bind and loose was to heal, and that a shepherd starving the wounded had abandoned the office. The letter is dated to about 254. What happened next is not recorded. Whether Marcianus was deposed, and when, the sources do not say. So the fixed point in the life of Faustinus is one year and one fight. He is not known to have written a book. He has no surviving sermon. He was a bishop in a Gallic city that had already produced a famous crop of martyrs in 177 and a famous bishop in Irenaeus, and what he did with his office was refuse to let a cruelty go unreported until somebody with the power to end it answered him. His own death is not on record. The date sometimes given, 254, is simply the year he last appears. Sources: Cyprian, Letter 66 in the Ante-Nicene Fathers numbering, to Stephen concerning Marcianus of Arles (Letter 68 in Hartel); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2; McClintock and Strong, Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature, article Faustinus.