Saint Nectarius

In spite of the very difficult times he had to endure, our saint Nectarius nonetheless linked his name to those of the writers who followed in the footsteps of Tertullian, Saint Justin, and Saint Melito, for the preaching of the faith and the refutation of heresies. Accord ing to Saint saint Jérôme Father of the Church and author of the original biography of Saint Asella. Jerome, he applied himself, in accordance with the legitimate concern of his pastoral office, to developing the meaning of the Holy Scriptures for the benefit of practical morality, and composed commentaries on Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus; he also published expositions on the prophecies of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Habakkuk. The choice of these studies was well-suited to the needs of persecuted Christians, and was intended to serve as consolation, as much as instruction, for those who had to be supported both against ignorance of the mysteries and the vanity of idolatry. But of these writings, nothing has remained to us. In the judgment of Saint Jerome, they were better in substance than in style, the author reflecting much better than he wrote, and expressing his thought only with quite remarkable difficulty. The Latin language was much less familiar to him than Greek, which confirms our opinion regarding his oriental origin, and explains how, by giving preference for his *Expositions* to an idiom that his people would better understand, he succeeded better in the meaning of things than in their expression.

Saint Nectarius did not only give testimony to his faith through theological teachings. He further confirmed it through a glorious martyrdom, one of the last that marked the sixth persecution ordered in 303 by Diocletian. It was the p Dioclétien Roman emperor under whom the martyrdom is said to have taken place. enultimate year of that tyrant's reign, the fourteenth of the episcopate of Nectarius, who, by the unanimous opinion of historians, had begun it in 290. Despite the fury of the pagans, which was never greater than in this final battle waged against Christianity, the faithful were able to keep his remains and bury them; no doubt, they did not wait for the peace granted to the Church by Constantine to allow for public homage to be paid to him; but they limited themselves to marking his burial with a simple and modest inscription, recently rediscovered, and anyone who wished to pray at his tomb could recognize it by these four words engraved on a narrow stone: HIC REQUIESCIT NECTARIUS ANTISTES. Such a monument is worth all the historical assertions for which we lack parchments today. Everything leads one to believe that the holy body was deposited, before the end of the same century, in the church of Saint-Hilaire, built in 308. It was from there that, following the Norman invasions, it w as transferred to the monastère de Long-Rhée Place of the transfer of the relics of Saint Nectarius. monastery of Long-Rhée, dependent on the famous collegiate church of the diocese of Auxerre. There, as in Poitiers, the holy bishop was honored on July 19. This was therefore the day of his translation, and not that of his death (which was November 2, as we have seen). These relics were kep t there unt Calvinistes Religious group that destroyed the saint's relics in 1567. il the days when the Calvinists, bringing desolation to the holy place, profaned them and seized the silver reliquary that contained them.

Saint Martial, after having established his see in Limoges in the first century and founded another center of Christianity in Poitiers, initially had no reason to institute a bishopric in the latter place, whether because the new Christianity was not yet significant enough there despite its relative importance, or because he hoped that some apostle might come there a little later from Rome, with which, however, communications were as rare as they were difficult. The territory of the Lemovices and the Pictons thus formed only one for religious assignments, and for more than a century and a half, the two peoples were of the same diocese. This long union may well have also come from the often energetic opposition made by Roman authority to the rapid progress of Christianity among the Poitevins. This intimacy must have persuaded Saint Martial not to hasten the presence of a bishop there. He died without having been able to realize this essential part of his plan, and soon after, as persecutions had arisen, his successors in Limoges had to renounce it like him, and keep the direction of both provinces. Thus, the two neighboring peoples, very distinct in soil, character, and popular habits, but very united by the same faith, remained under the same pastoral crook, and the bishops of Augustoritum (Limoges) were the same as those of Limonum (Poiti Limonum City where the saint settled and lived as a recluse. ers).

Causes of great gravity finally determined, towards the end of the 3rd century, the division of this overly vast d iocese of Limoges diocèse de Limoges Possible birthplace of the saint and origin of the woman who received the miracle. into two Churches independent of one another. Already this delimitation had been prescribed in many other places, either by the Popes or by the Councils. Pope Saint Dionysius, among o Le pape saint Denys Pope who regulated the jurisdiction of dioceses in 271. thers, had renewed in 271 an earlier decree regulating the jurisdiction of bishops and priests, and prescribing for each to keep the henceforth invariable limits of his diocese or parish.

We thus arrive towards the end of the 3rd century. It was far from the case that Gaul had preserved the religious peace that the emperors had left it at the beginning. The number of Christians had increased considerably; the triumph of the faith over pagan philosophy, whose varied sects were as many enemies to it, as well as the interested antagonism of idolatrous priests, had aroused violent hatreds, and the emperors, who found in their hideous passions as many pretexts to fight such an inconvenient doctrine, had almost all endeavored to abolish it. The bloody contentions of the thirty tyrants, the anarchy that shortly preceded the defeat and fall of Valerian, had not prevented him from ordering a persecution which was the eighth, and extended over the entire surface of the Gauls. It is therefore simultaneously to the severity of the persecutions and to the all the greater need to exercise more active surveillance over the clergy and the faithful in circumstances where unity became more necessary, that one must attribute the separation into two dioceses of the territory which had formed only one until then.

To summarize, the apostolic league of Saint Martial appears at the first-century origin of the Church of Poitiers; that of Saint Nectarius or Victorinus opens, towards the end of the 3rd century, the catalog of the episcopate of this same Church, which has just conquered its religious autonomy by the force of circumstances.

Abbé Auber, Origines de l'Église de Poitiers. Poitiers, Dupré, 1866.