Rusticianus of Brescia

Rusticianus I was bishop of Brescia at the end of the sixth century and is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church, in the diocese of Brescia. His commemoration is on 5 January, and on 28 March the day of the translation of his relics is kept.

In the lists of the bishops of Brescia, Rusticianus appears as successor of Honorius and predecessor of Dominator. Some authors give more precise dates, from 585 to 595, but the medieval sources do not support them. Few reports of his deeds have survived.

It has been suggested that he was the Brescian bishop Berticianus who in 594, against his metropolitan, supported the doctrine of the Three Chapters and was deprived of communion by Pope Gregory the Great. The existence of a bishop Berticianus of Brescia, however, is considered unfounded, since it rests on a mistaken citation from the pope's Dialogues. Yet a conflict between the bishop and citizens of Brescia and Constantius of Milan over the Three Chapters is attested by several letters of Gregory. It is thought that these events more likely took place under the successor of Rusticianus.

Hagiographical writing speaks of his great virtue and of the firmness with which he defended the true faith in a time when many of his flock were Arians. After his death he was buried in Brescia. About 1502 a new shrine was made for his relics, of which only a fragment survives today, exhibited at Brescia.

Like all the bishops of Brescia of the third to seventh centuries, from Anatolius to Deusdedit, he was numbered among the saints already in the Middle Ages. The first written evidence of his cult at Brescia dates from the eleventh century.