Verecundus of Junca

Verecundus was bishop of Junca, a town in the African province of Byzacena, in the sixth century. He died at Chalcedon in 552.

His life ran into the Three Chapters controversy, the last great crisis of the ancient Latin church, and it killed him.

The emperor Justinian, trying to win back the Eastern churches that had rejected the Council of Chalcedon, issued an edict condemning three long-dead Antiochene figures, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and certain writings of Theodoret of Cyrus and Ibas of Edessa. To the bishops of the Latin West, and above all to the Africans, this looked like an attack on Chalcedon by the back door, since Chalcedon had received Theodoret and Ibas into communion. They also objected on principle that men who had died at peace with the church could not be tried afterward.

Africa resisted almost unanimously and paid for it: bishops were deposed, exiled, and imprisoned.

Verecundus was summoned to Constantinople with Primasius of Hadrumetum to represent Byzacena, and arrived about the middle of 551. He stood with Pope Vigilius, who was in the capital under heavy pressure and was wavering. In the summer of 551 the pressure turned to force: imperial officers came to seize Vigilius, and the pope and those with him fled across the water to Chalcedon and took sanctuary in the basilica of Saint Euphemia, the very church where the Council of Chalcedon had met a century before. Verecundus went with him.

He died there, in that refuge, in 552, the year before the Second Council of Constantinople met and condemned the Three Chapters. Primasius, who had come with him, eventually signed. Verecundus did not live to be asked again.

He left writings, and they are not polemical. A commentary on the church canticles survives, the songs of Scripture sung in the office: the song of Moses and of Miriam at the sea, the song of Deborah, Hezekiah's prayer, Habakkuk, the prayer of Manasseh, the thanksgiving of Jonah, the song of the three young men in the furnace. Verecundus takes them one at a time and reads them as the church's own voice. He also wrote a poem On the Satisfaction of Penance, a long penitential lament, and a Breviarium summarising the acts of the Council of Chalcedon, arranged to support the case he died holding.

The canticle commentary is a quiet thing to leave behind: a book about the songs the church sings when it has been delivered, written by a man who was not.

Sources: Verecundus of Junca, Commentarii super cantica ecclesiastica and Carmen de satisfactione paenitentiae (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 93); Victor of Tunnuna, Chronicle; the Liber Pontificalis (for the flight to Saint Euphemia); the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.