Pacian of Barcelona

Pacian was bishop of Barcelona in the second half of the fourth century. Jerome, who included him in his catalogue of Christian writers, says he was distinguished both for his eloquence and for the way he lived, that he wrote several works, and that he died in extreme old age under the emperor Theodosius, so about 390 or shortly after. He had a son, Flavius Dexter, who rose to high imperial office and to whom Jerome dedicated the catalogue.

His surviving writings are few and short, and nearly all of them are about one question: what the church does with Christians who have sinned badly after baptism.

The Novatianists said the answer was nothing. That movement, going back to a Roman schism of the third century, held that the church had no power to readmit those who had denied the faith or committed grave sin; they could be told to repent and hope, but not restored to communion. A Novatianist named Sympronian wrote to Pacian pressing the case. Pacian's three letters in reply are his best-known work.

In the first of them comes the sentence that has outlived everything else he wrote. Sympronian had objected to the word 'catholic' as a novelty, since the apostles did not use it. Pacian answered: 'Christian is my name, but Catholic is my surname', Christianus mihi nomen est, catholicus vero cognomen. The first names him; the second marks him out, he says, from the sects that also call themselves Christian. The line has been quoted ever since, by Catholics as a claim and by others as a definition of what the word was doing in the fourth century.

The rest of the correspondence argues for mercy. Pacian holds that the power to forgive was given to the church, that a bishop who refuses to restore the repentant is refusing what Christ commanded, and that the Novatianist position makes the cross smaller than the sin. He is not soft about it: his longer work, the Paraenesis ad paenitentiam, an exhortation to penance, is a hard sermon telling people who are putting off confession that they are gambling with their souls, and demanding public penance in earnest. Mercy, in Pacian, is not the absence of severity; it is what severity is for.

He also left a short sermon on baptism, explaining the rite plainly to candidates.

Jerome mentions a work of his called Cervulus, written against a rowdy New Year's custom in which people dressed as a stag; it has not survived. The Roman church keeps his feast on 9 March.

Sources: Pacian of Barcelona, Letters to Sympronian, Paraenesis ad paenitentiam, and Sermo de baptismo (English translation in Fathers of the Church, volume 99); Jerome, De viris illustribus 106; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.