Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - Saint Paulinus of Nola, contemporary of Saint Augustine, with whom he had a bond of friendship, came from the Bordeaux region of France where he was born of a noble family. However he exercised his ministry at Nola, in the Campania region of Italy, where he was a monk, then a priest and a bishop. Continuing his catechesis on the apostolic Fathers, Pope Benedict XVI dedicated his general audience on Wednesday 12 December to the holy Bishop of Nola. Paulinus initially embraced a political career and while still a young man became governor of Campania. It was in this period that he was moved to conversion as he observed the simple and intense faith with which the people honoured the tomb of the holy martyr Saint Felice, at the Shrine of what today is Cimitile. “Since he was responsible for public life, Paulinus was concerned for the Shrine - the Pope recalled in his catechesis - he had a hospice for the poor built there and a road to make it more easily accessible for the many pilgrims. As he worked to build the earthly city, he gradually discovered the path towards the heavenly city. The encounter with Christ was the point of arrival of a laborious journey, strewn with trials”.
In Milan he attended the school of Ambrose, and then completed his Christian formation in his homeland receiving baptism from the hands of the Bishop of Bordeaux, Delfino. He married Terasia, a pious noble women from Barcelona, who bore him a son, but the child only lived a few days. Shattered by this tragedy, he felt a call to embrace a rigorous ascetic life and, in agreement with his wife, sold his possessions for the benefit of the poor and moved to Nola, where he took up abode next to the Basilica of Saint Felice, “living by that time in chaste brotherhood in keeping with a life style in which he was joined by others. The community rhythm was of monastic form, but Paulinus, who in Barcelona had been ordained a priest, devoted himself to his priestly ministry as well assisting the pilgrims. This earned him the sympathy and trust of the Christian community which, after Bishop's death around the year 409, chose him as successor on the cathedra of Nola”.
Pope Benedict XVI underlined “his pastoral work became more intense and marked by special attention for the poor. He left an image of the authentic shepherd of charity …”. To his teacher Ausonius, who after his conversion rebuked him for "despising" material goods and abandoning a scholar's vocation, “Paulinus replied - the Pope recalled - that his giving to the poor did not mean scorn for earthly goods, but instead their valorisation for a higher end, that of charity. As for literary commitments…a new aesthetics now governed his sensitivity: the beauty of God, incarnate, crucified and risen, whose bard he had become”.
“His lyrics are songs of faith and love- said Benedict XVI -, in which the daily story of great and small events is seen as the story of salvation, the story God has with each one of us. Close to the shrine of the martyr Felice, he had a new basilica built and decorated “in a way that the paintings, illustrated by opportune captions, served as visual catechesis for the pilgrims… still today it is possible to admire the remains of these achievements which rightly set the Shrine of Nola among the figures of reference of Christian archaeology”.
Another characteristic trait of the life of Paulinus was the ample space given to Sacred Scripture, which “read, meditated, assimilated, was light under whose ray the Saint of Nola probed his soul as he strived for perfection … Besides ascesis and the Word of God, charity: in the monastic community the poor were at home. Paulinus did not only give them alms: he welcomed them as if they were Christ himself”.
The Holy Father concluded his catechesis recalling that Saint Paulinus “did not write treatises of theology, however his lyrics and intense epistolary are rich in a lived theology, drenched in the Word of God, continually probed as light for life. There emerges in particular a sense of the Church as a mystery of unity. He lived communion above all with a marked practice of spiritual friendship. In this Paulinus was truly a master, making his life a crossroads of elect spirits … Apart from the contents of the different letters, what impresses is the warmth with which the Saint of Nola sings of friendship, as a manifestation of the one Body of Christ animated by the Holy Spirit … the testimony of Saint Paulinus of Nola helps us sense the Church as she is presented to us by Vatican II, a sacrament of intimate union with God and so of the unity of all of us and of the whole human race ”. (S.L.) (Agenzia Fides 13/12/2007 - righe 52, parole 778)
