Marolus of Milan

Saint Marolus was Archbishop of Milan from 408 to 423. The Roman Catholic Church honours him as a saint and commemorates him on 23 April. No reports of his life survive from his own time; what is known comes mostly from what Ennodius of Pavia wrote of him at the start of the sixth century.

Beginnings

According to Ennodius, bishop of Pavia, Marolus was born on the banks of the Tigris in Mesopotamia. Probably because of the persecutions of Shapur II, he moved before the year 380 to Syria, where he grew up. Later he came to Rome, where he became a friend of Pope Innocent I, and then to Milan, where he was made bishop in 408. Other accounts, however, speak of a man of the region who went to study in Syria and left in Milan the fame of an ascetic.

Episcopate

Marolus was bishop of Milan at the time of the Visigothic invasion of Italy and helped the victims of that invasion. He is said to have brought to Milan from Antioch the relics of Saint Babylas of Antioch and Saint Romanus of Caesarea, and to have founded in the city a church known as the Basilica Concilia Sanctorum, or the church of San Romano, which no longer stands, near the present church of San Babila.

The catalogue of the archbishops of Milan places his episcopate between those of Venerius, historically attested in 404/407, and Martinianus, attested in 431, and gives him fifteen years of episcopate, hence the years 408 to 423.

His repose and veneration

Marolus fell asleep on 23 April 423 and was buried in the church of Saints Nazarius and Celsus in Milan. His relics were moved within the same basilica of San Nazaro by Carlo Borromeo in 1579. Ennodius dedicated a poem to him.