Patiens of Lyon

Saint Patiens was bishop of Lyon in the fifth century, successor of Saint Eucherius, and died before the year 494, on 11 September. He is honoured as a saint of the undivided Church and is counted among the saints by the Roman Catholic Church. He is remembered on 11 September. He was a man of mercy, known above all for his love of the poor and his care to feed the people in time of famine.

The bishop

In the oldest list of the bishops of Lyon, preserved in a gospel book of the middle of the ninth century, drawn up about 799 to 814, his name stands in twentieth place, between Saint Eucherius, who died on 16 November 449, and Saint Lupicinus, who served until 494 or 495. Of his life before the episcopate nothing is known. His episcopate began, most probably, in 450. What is known of his rule is tied to the letters of Saint Sidonius Apollinaris, with whom he corresponded after the latter became, in 469 or 470, bishop of Auvergne. Sidonius admired him and said that, though he lived austerely, he made himself all things to all men.

Patiens raised a church, later dedicated to Saint Nicetius, consecrated between 469 and 471, for which Sidonius composed an inscription poem. The building of other churches is also attributed to him, perhaps wrongly, among them a new cathedral dedicated to Saint Stephen, and the remodelling of a baptistery of Saint John, later the cathedral of Saint-⁠Jean-⁠Baptiste. He commissioned Constantius of Lyon to write the Life of Germanus of Auxerre.

Councils and care for the poor

He took part in several councils of his time. About the year 470 he spoke at a council that had to settle the difficult election of the bishop of Chalon, and he made John bishop. In 474 or 475 a council was held at Arles which condemned the priest Lucidus of Riez, an adherent of a wrong teaching on predestination. The name of Patiens appears in the letter of the council concerning Lucidus and Veranus of Vence. At a council held at Lyon about 475, whose acts are lost, other errors of Lucidus were condemned. On this occasion, according to some reports, Patiens presented to the assembly a theological collection called "ecclesiastical dogma". Some sermons are also attributed to him.

Sidonius mentions in his letters the great love of Patiens for the poor, not only of his own diocese but of other parts of Gaul. He gave all his means to relieve them. In the famine between 472 and 475 he brought wheat on the Rhône and the Saône to feed the people. He was also zealous in confronting the heresies of the time.

Death and commemoration

The letters of Sidonius do not mention the death of Patiens, nor even that of his successor, so it is probable that he died after Sidonius, between 480 and 494. The oldest evidence of liturgical commemoration is in the Hieronymian Martyrology, of the fifth and sixth centuries, where the day of commemoration is set on 11 September. From there it passed into the Roman Martyrology. The Roman Martyrology remembers him thus: at Lyon, in France, the holy Patiens, bishop, who, moved by love, distributed wheat free to the cities along the Rhône and the Saône, to help the people oppressed by famine, and laboured much for the conversion of heretics and care of the needy.