St. Irenaeus returns from Rome to replace the bishop killed at Lyons

LYONS, Gaul, 177 AD — Christians in prison at Lyons for their faith sent one of the city’s priests, Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, to Rome this year with a letter for Pope St. Eleutherus. He came home to a church in which at least forty-eight Christians had been killed, its bishop among them, and he was made bishop in the dead man’s place.

The prisoners wanted an end to a quarrel that was dividing the churches of Asia Minor over a man there who claimed to prophesy, and they wanted the Pope to know what the Christians of Gaul thought of his prophecies.

They were in prison because the pagans of Lyons had turned on the Christians. Christians were first turned away from other people’s houses, the public baths and the markets. Then they were arrested, questioned in the forum in front of a crowd and jailed until the governor reached the city. Some of the Christians’ pagan servants were arrested as well and, afraid of torture, accused their masters of eating children and of incest. St. Blandina, a slave, was tortured from morning until evening and kept giving one answer: “I am a Christian, and there is nothing vile done by us.”

The quarrel the prisoners wrote about was in Asia Minor, and missionaries from Asia Minor had built up the Church in Gaul. Many of the Christians of Lyons came from Asia Minor too, and they were in almost daily contact with the East.

The quarrel had begun in Phrygia, in Asia Minor, where a recent convert named Montanus and two women with him started to prophesy. They did not claim to carry a message from God; they said God had taken possession of them, and they spoke as God, in the first person. “I am the Father, the Word, and the Paraclete,” Montanus said. In St. John’s Gospel the Paraclete is the Spirit whom Christ promised to send. Many believed Montanus, but other Christians there examined the prophecies and condemned them, and bishops began to expel the prophets’ followers from the Church.

The Christians of Gaul wrote down their own judgment on the prophecy. The prisoners wrote letters of their own on the same question, and a letter addressed to Pope St. Eleutherus. The judgment and the letters were sent to the churches of Asia Minor and to the Pope. The Church historian Eusebius of Caesarea called the judgment “prudent and most orthodox” and wrote that the Christians of Gaul were “negotiating for the peace of the churches”.

The prisoners asked St. Irenaeus to carry the judgment and their letters to the Pope. He was a presbyter of the church at Lyons, a priest who sat on the council that ran a local church under its bishop. He had come to Gaul from Asia Minor, where as a boy at Smyrna he had heard the city’s bishop, St. Polycarp, preach. St. Polycarp had also sent Lyons its first bishop, St. Pothinus.

A cleric travelling to another church carried a letter of commendation testifying that his morals and his doctrine were sound. The prisoners wrote their commendation of St. Irenaeus into their letter to the Pope. “We pray, father Eleutherus, that you may rejoice in God in all things and always,” they wrote. “We have requested our brother and comrade Irenæus to carry this letter to you, and we ask you to hold him in esteem, as zealous for the covenant of Christ.” The prisoners named his rank and said it was not their reason for commending him: “For if we thought that office could confer righteousness upon any one, we should commend him among the first as a presbyter of the church, which is his position.”

St. Irenaeus left for Rome. Pope Benedict XVI, teaching on St. Irenaeus, said: “His mission to Rome saved Irenaeus from the persecution of Marcus Aurelius”.

St. Pothinus, the bishop, was more than ninety and so weak he could hardly breathe when soldiers brought him to the governor’s tribunal. The governor asked him who the God of the Christians was. “If you are worthy, you shall know,” St. Pothinus said. He was dragged away, and the crowd hit him, kicked him and threw whatever they could pick up. He was thrown into the prison and died two days later.

The governor wrote to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius about his prisoners. The emperor answered that they were to be put to death, and that anyone who denied Christ was to be set free. When a public festival opened at Lyons, the governor had the prisoners who were Roman citizens beheaded and sent the others to be killed by wild animals in the amphitheatre. St. Blandina was the last of them to be killed, on the last day of the games in the amphitheatre.

The Christians who were left could not bury the dead. The bodies were left in the open under guard for six days, then burned, and the ashes were swept into the Rhône. “Now let us see if they will rise again, and if their God is able to help them, and to deliver them out of our hands,” the men who burned them said.

St. Irenaeus came back from Rome and was made Bishop of Lyons in St. Pothinus’s place.