Maro

Saint Maro (also called Maro Severinus) was, according to the tradition of the Church of Naples, the third bishop of Naples, between Epithymetus and Probus, and is venerated as a saint by the Catholic Church. He is said to have been born at Naples in the second century and to have fallen asleep there on 15 June 180.

The old lists of bishops, the Gesta episcoporum Neapolitanorum and the Catalogus episcoporum Neapolitanorum, say that he shepherded the Church of Naples for twenty-⁠eight years, in the time of the popes Hyginus and Pius I and of the emperor Antoninus Pius. Traditionally his episcopate is placed between the years 152 and 180, but the chronology is approximate and not confirmed by contemporary documents. The marble calendar of Naples, one of the oldest liturgical documents of the city, indicates his commemoration on 15 June. The Gesta say that his relics were moved, in the time of Bishop John IV (first half of the ninth century), to the cathedral called Stefania.

In the early seventeenth century a second name, Severinus, was attributed to him. It comes from some early medieval martyrologies, among them that of Usuard, which brought into the list of Neapolitan bishops a bishop Severinus, merging into one person the bishop Severinus of Septempeda and the monk Severinus of Noricum, whose tomb lay near Naples. Hence the name Maro Severinus, which still appears in the inscriptions in the cathedral of Naples.