Saint Francis Regis Clet and saint Flavian

SAINT FRANCIS REGIS CLET
Lazarist Missionary
(1748-1820)

Born in 1748, Francis was the son of a merchant of Grenoble in France; he was the tenth of fifteen children. The family was deeply religious, and several of its members were already consecrated to God. Francis attended the Jesuit college at Grenoble, and in 1769 entered the novitiate of the Lazarists, a missionary Community founded by Saint Vincent de Paul. He was ordained a priest in 1773, then taught moral theology in a diocesan seminary. In 1789 he was named director of the Lazarist Seminary in Paris, but was obliged by the fury of the revolution in that year, with the entire Congregation, to abandon the mother house.

Saint Francis exposed his desire to be a foreign missionary to his superior, and was sent by him to China in 1791; there he labored for 28 years, entirely alone for several years in a vast district. Death had deprived him of his two brother-priests. Persecutions in 1812 and 1818 destroyed his church and schoolhouse, and he himself escaped several times, as it were by miracle, from searching parties. But he was finally betrayed by a Chinese Christian for a large sum of money, and seized in June of 1819.

For five weeks he endured cruel tortures in total silence, then was transferred to another prison, where he found a fellow Chinese Lazarist from whom he could receive the Sacraments. His death sentence was pronounced in January of 1820, and he died in February of that year, strangled while tied to a stake erected like a cross.

Source: The Catholic Encyclopedia, edited by C. G. Herbermann with numerous collaborators (Appleton Company: New York, 1908).

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SAINT FLAVIAN
Patriarch of Constantinople, Martyr
(†449)

Flavian was elected Patriarch of Constantinople in 447. His short episcopate of two years was from its outset a time of conflict and persecution. The eunuch Chrysaphius, the emperor’s favorite, tried to extort a large sum of money from Saint Flavian on the occasion of his consecration as archbishop. The Archbishop sent him some blessed bread as a sign of peace and communion, but his fidelity in refusing what might even have the appearance of simony, brought on him the enmity of the most powerful man in the empire, the same Chrysaphius.

In 448 Flavian had to condemn the rising heresy of the abbot Eutyches, who was a relative of Chrysaphius; the unfortunate abbot obstinately denied that Our Lord was in two perfect natures after His Incarnation. Eutyches drew to his cause all the bad elements which gathered about the Byzantine court. His intrigues were long baffled by the vigilance of Saint Flavian; but at last he obtained from the emperor the assembly of a council at Ephesus, in August 449, presided over by his friend Dioscorus, Patriarch of Alexandria. Its purpose was to depose Flavian and reverse the decision of the earlier council which had condemned Eutyches. Eutyches entered into this “robber council,” as it is called, surrounded by soldiers. The Roman legates could not even read aloud the Pope’s letter, which clearly established Catholic doctrine and revealed the ignorance of Eutyches. At the first sign of resistance to the condemnation of the Catholic Patriarch Flavian, fresh troops entered with drawn swords. In spite of the protests of the legates, the soldiers terrified most of the bishops into acquiescence.

The fury of Dioscorus reached its height when Flavian appealed to the Holy See. The heretical bishop, who soon afterward would pretend to excommunicate the reigning Vicar of Christ, Saint Leo, forgot his apostolic office and laid violent hands on his adversary. Saint Flavian was seized by Dioscorus and others, thrown down, beaten, kicked, and finally carried into banishment at Epipa, near Sardes in Lydia, where he died shortly afterwards, in August of 449.

Let us contrast the ends of the faithful and the unfaithful servants. Saint Flavian clung to the teaching of the Roman Pontiff, and sealed his faith with his blood. Two years after his death, the Council of Chalcedon placed him among the choir of martyrs and Saints. Dioscorus, who “excommunicated” the Vicar of Christ, died obstinate and impenitent in the heresy of Eutyches. Chrysaphius was disgraced and sentenced to death by the emperor, whose eyes were eventually opened.