Saint Irenaeus of Lyons

Saint Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, had been taught by Apostles and appointed to his see by Apostles in Asia. St. Irenaeus attended his school as a boy. Writing to a man named Florinus decades later, he said he could still describe the place where St. Polycarp sat to speak, his manner of life and his face.

He remembered those years better than recent ones, he told Florinus. He had seen Florinus in those days too, in splendour at the royal court, trying to win the old bishop's approval.

About 150 AD St. Polycarp travelled to Rome and took up with Pope Anicetus the day on which Easter should be kept. The churches of Asia kept it on the fourteenth day of the moon, on whatever day of the week that fell. Neither bishop persuaded the other.

They communed together anyway, and Pope Anicetus let St. Polycarp offer the Eucharist in the church as a mark of respect. They parted in peace. St. Irenaeus set the scene down forty years later, when the same question had grown dangerous.

By 177 AD St. Irenaeus was a priest of the Church of Lyons in Gaul, a Greek living among Celts and using their language. That year the pagans of the city turned on the Christians, and forty-eight died under torture, among them Saint Blandina. Saint Pothinus, the bishop, was ninety; he was dragged before the judgment seat and died in prison two days later.

The Christians already in prison asked St. Irenaeus to carry their letter to Pope Eleutherus at Rome. The errand kept him out of the city while the killing went on.

St. Pothinus was dead, and St. Irenaeus returned from Rome to succeed him as Bishop of Lyons. He held the see until about 202 AD. Lyons was then the only organised church in Gaul.

In his own district of the Rhone the followers of Marcus the magician had deluded many women. One of his deacons took Marcus into his house, and the deacon's wife was seduced. The brethren brought her back with great difficulty, and she spent her whole time afterwards in public confession.

The teachers he fought held that the God who made the world was not the Father of Jesus Christ. They taught that the faith of the Church was a picture for simple people, and that they themselves had the real knowledge. St. Irenaeus read their commentaries and met some of them in person before he wrote a word against them.

He finished the first three books of his refutation about 180 AD. Against a knowledge handed on in secret he set an open succession: the bishops of Rome in order, from Linus down to Eleutherus, who then held the see. At the close of his book On the Ogdoad he put whoever should copy it on oath to correct the transcript against the original.

About 190 AD Pope Victor wrote to cut the parishes of all Asia out of the common unity of the Church. Those churches kept Easter on the fourteenth day of the moon rather than on a Sunday. His letters declared the brethren there wholly excommunicate, shut out from communion with the rest of the Church.

The bishops of Gaul had already decided for the Sunday, and St. Irenaeus held with them. He wrote to Pope Victor all the same, and reproached him for cutting the Asians off so quickly. He named five bishops of Rome before Pope Victor who had not kept the Asian fast and had stayed at peace with those who did.

Parted from his friend Marcianus, St. Irenaeus wrote to him instead. He sent a short handbook of what a Christian must hold, the Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching. It sets out the faith in three points: the Father who made all things, the Son who was incarnate and died and rose, and the Holy Spirit.

Pope Benedict XVI calls the book the oldest catechism of Christian doctrine. It later disappeared from the Greek and Latin world altogether. An Armenian manuscript of it was found in the Church of the Blessed Virgin at Eriwan in December 1904 AD.

The ministry of St. Irenaeus at Lyons ended in about 202 AD. The Church keeps June 28 as the day of his burial there. According to longstanding Catholic Tradition he is venerated as a martyr.

His body lies in the crypt at Lyons that St. Patiens built at the end of the fifth century. On January 21, 2022 AD Pope Francis declared him a Doctor of the Church with the title *Doctor unitatis* (*Doctor of unity*). The decree of Pope Francis notes that he came from the East and exercised his episcopal ministry in the West.