Saint of the Day Online - St Irenaeus

Saint of the Day for Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Saint Name: St. Irenaeus
Place: Turkey
Birth: AD 130
Death: AD 32
Feast: 24 June

St. Irenaeus who was born in the early 2nd century was Bishop of Lugdunum in Gaul, then a part of the Roman Empire (now Lyon, France). He was an early Church Father and apologist, and his writings were formative in the early development of Christian theology.

Many Asian priests and missionaries brought the gospel to the pagan Gauls and founded a local church. To this church of Lyon, Irenaeus came to serve as a priest under its first bishop, St. Pothinus, an oriental like himself. In the year 177, Irenaeus was sent to Rome. This mission explains how it was that he was not called upon to share in the martyrdom of St Pothinus during the terrible persecution in Lyons. When he returned to Lyons it was to occupy the vacant bishopric. By this time, the persecution was over. It was the spread of Gnosticism in Gaul, and the ravages it was making among the Christians of his diocese, that inspired him to undertake the task of exposing its errors. He produced a treatise in five books in which he sets forth fully the inner doctrines of the various sects and afterward contrasts them with the teaching of the Apostles and the text of the Holy Scripture. His work, written in Greek but quickly translated to Latin, was widely circulated and succeeded in dealing a death-blow to Gnosticism. At any rate, from that time onwards, it ceased to offer a serious menace to the Catholic faith.

Irenaeus is recognized as a saint in both the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. His feast day is on June 28 in the General Roman Calendar, where it was inserted for the first time in 1920; in 1960 the Roman Catholic Church transferred it to July 3, leaving June 28 for the Vigil of the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, but in 1969 it was returned to June 28, the day of his death. The Lutheran Church commemorates Irenaeus on that same date for his life of exemplary Christian witness. In the Eastern Catholic Church and Orthodox Church, his feast day is 23 August.