Paternus

Paternus was bishop and metropolitan of Tomis in the first half of the sixth century, attested by documents, among them an inscription on a liturgical vessel. He is named in the Romanian Paterikon and venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization; the sources available to us give no day of commemoration.

His name points to a Latin, that is Daco-⁠Roman, origin, and the Paterikon supposes that he was formed in a monastery of the diocese. He became shepherd of Dobruja after a period of about sixty years, between 460 and 520, for which the name of no bishop is known. The first testimony about him is the Latin inscription on a gilded silver vessel, made in the early sixth century for the cathedral of Tomis, found in 1912 and kept today in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. The donor is called there bishop metropolitan.

In his time the see of Tomis was raised to the rank of metropolis, with fourteen suffragan sees in the cities of the province of Scythia. The Paterikon holds that in this period the Church of Dobruja had one of its greatest flowerings, with more than a hundred churches and many monasteries.

Paternus did not accept the theopaschite formula upheld by the Scythian monks, who in 519 went to Constantinople and to Rome. In 520, being at Constantinople, he took part with twenty other hierarchs in the election of Patriarch Epiphanius and signed the letter to Pope Hormisdas as metropolitan of the province of Scythia. The Paterikon adds that he trained missionary priests and monks, sent north of the Danube as far as the Olt and Argeș valleys and the land of Buzău. After more than ten years of service he gave up his soul into the hands of Christ.