Gaudentius of Brescia

Gaudentius grew up in the church at Brescia in northern Italy under Bishop Filastrius, the cataloguer of heresies, who taught him and whom he called father. Some time around 387, wanting to escape the reputation he had already gained, he went east on pilgrimage. He got as far as Caesarea in Cappadocia, where the nieces of Basil the Great gave him relics of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste — the soldiers who were left to freeze on a lake in Armenia for refusing to sacrifice. While he was away, Filastrius died and the people of Brescia elected Gaudentius in his place. He did not want it. He was informed that if he did not come home he would be excommunicated, and that the neighboring bishops would consecrate no one else. He came home, and Ambrose of Milan consecrated him. He built a church for the relics he had brought back and called it the Assembly of the Saints. His dedication sermon for it survives. His great test came in 405. John Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople, had been deposed by a rigged synod and exiled, and the Western church did not accept it. Pope Innocent I and the emperor Honorius sent a delegation east to demand a proper council. Gaudentius was one of the three bishops chosen to go. The embassy was a disaster. The delegates were intercepted in Thrace, held under guard in a fortress, denied any audience with the eastern emperor Arcadius, and had their letters taken from them. They were threatened, offered bribes, and finally put on an unseaworthy ship and sent home; the voyage nearly killed them. They never reached Constantinople and never saw Chrysostom. Chrysostom, in exile in the mountains of Armenia, learned what they had attempted and wrote to Gaudentius to thank him. The letter survives. Palladius, who wrote the defense of Chrysostom's life, recorded the whole failed mission in detail. About twenty-one of Gaudentius's sermons survive, most of them a course of Easter-week preaching delivered to the newly baptized, taking them through the Passover, the Exodus and the Eucharist. He also wrote against the Manichaeans. He died about 410. Sources: John Chrysostom, Letters; Palladius, Dialogue on the Life of St John Chrysostom; Gaudentius of Brescia, Tractatus (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 68); The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "St. Gaudentius".