Paulinus of Nola

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Paulinus of Nola : biography

354 – 431

Many of Paulinus’s letters to his contemporaries, including Ausonius and Sulpicius Severus in southern Gaul, Victricius of Rouen in northern Gaul, and Augustine in Africa, are preserved.

Paulinus may have been indirectly responsible for Augustine’s Confessions: Paulinus wrote to Alypius, Bishop of Thagaste and a close friend of St. Augustine, asking about his conversion and taking up of the ascetic life. Alypius’s autobiographical response does not survive; St. Augustine’s ostensible answer to that query is the "Confessions."

Around 410 Paulinus was chosen Bishop of Nola. Like a growing number of aristocrats in the late 4th and early 5th centuries who were entering the clergy rather than taking up the more usual administrative careers in the imperial service, Paulinus spent a great deal of his money on his chosen church and city.

We know about his buildings in honor of St. Felix from literary and archaeological evidence, especially from his long letter to Sulpicius Severus describing the arrangement of the building and its decoration. He includes a detailed description of the apse mosaic over the main altar and gives the text for a long inscription he had written to be put on the wall under the image. By explaining how he intended the visitors to understand the image over the altar, Paulinus provided rare insight into the intentions of a patron of art in the later Empire.

In later life Paulinus, by then a highly respected church authority, participated in multiple church synods investigating various ecclesiastical controversies of the time, including Pelagianism.

Relics

About 800 Prince Grimoald III of Benevento removed Paulinus’s bones as relics.

From the 11th century they rested at the church of Saint Adalbert, now Saint Bartholomew, on the island in the Tiber in Rome. In 1908 Pope Pius X permitted them to be translated to the new cathedral at Nola, where they were reinterred on 15 May 1909.Trout, Dennis E. (1999). Paulinus of Nola: Life, Letters, and Poems. Berkeley: University of California Press. p.267.

The bones are now found in the small Sicilian city of Sutera, where they dedicate a feast day, and conduct a procession for the saint at Easter each year.

Modern devotion to St. Paulinus

The people of modern day Nola and the surrounding regions remain devoted to St. Paulinus. His feast day is celebrated annually in Nola during "La Festa dei Gigli" (the Feast of the Lilies), in which Gigli and several large statues in honor of the saint, placed on towers, are carried upon the shoulders of the faithful around the city.

In the United States the descendants of Italian immigrants from Nola and Brusciano continue the tradition in Brooklyn and elsewhere.