Victor of Capua

Saint Victor was bishop of Capua, in Italy, from 23 February 541 until his death in April 554 (on 2 April, according to one source). He is venerated as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church. The sources do not agree on his commemoration: one gives 2 April, another 17 October. We have no Orthodox act of canonization, so we call him a saint of the undivided Church in the West.

He was successor of another bishop of Capua, Saint Germanus. Little is known of his life; his epitaph is preserved (CIL 4503), from which it appears that his episcopate ended in April 554. His writings, preserved in fragments, show him as a distinguished scholar and a man of great culture. His best known work is the Codex Fuldensis, one of the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Vulgate, produced under his direction and revised and corrected by himself. It is distinguished by giving, in place of the four Gospels, a harmony of them going back to Tatian's Diatessaron, that is, as the preface says, a single Gospel drawn from the four canonical ones. It was written between 541 and 546, while he was bishop, and contains the whole New Testament, together with the apocryphal Epistle to the Laodiceans.

His other works are "De cyclo Paschali", on the Paschal cycle, praised and quoted in fragments by Bede; commentaries on the Old and New Testaments, lost and known from a fragment in Bede; "Libellus reticulus seu De arca Noe", which contains an ingenious calculation to prove that the measures of Noah's Ark are nothing other than an allegory of the years of Christ's life; and "Capitula de resurrectione Domini", on the genealogy of Jesus and the time of the crucifixion. He also composed an arrangement of the pericopes in a lectionary, dedicated to Constantius of Aquino. Most of these works are lost.

The veneration of Saint Victor and the churches dedicated to him are found at Capua, Caiazzo, Sessa Aurunca, Nola, Giffoni and Castro Serino. His relics were found at Montevergine on 27 July 1480 and moved in 1967 to the cathedral of Capua. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him as a bishop renowned for learning and holiness.