St. Paulinus of Nola

St. Paulinus of Nola was born around 354 near Bordeaux in Roman Gaul to one of the wealthiest senatorial families of the empire. Educated by the poet Ausonius, he enjoyed a brilliant early career — advocate, senator, and governor of the Italian province of Campania — where he first encountered the tomb of St. Felix at Nola and the devotion of the pilgrims who gathered there. In midlife, Paulinus's world turned decisively toward God. He married a devout Spanish Christian, Therasia, and was baptized around 389. The death of their only child, an infant son, deepened the couple's detachment from worldly ambition. To the astonishment and dismay of aristocratic society, Paulinus and Therasia sold their vast estates and gave the proceeds to the poor — a renunciation praised by his contemporaries Augustine, Jerome, and Ambrose, with whom he corresponded. Ordained a priest in Barcelona in 394, Paulinus settled at Nola beside the tomb of St. Felix, living a quasi-monastic life of prayer, hospitality, and care for pilgrims and the poor. Around 409 he was made bishop of Nola, shepherding his people through the turbulent years that followed the Gothic sack of Rome. He is remembered as one of the foremost Christian poets of the ancient Church; each year he composed a poem for the feast of St. Felix, and his surviving verse and letters give a vivid picture of early Christian devotion to the saints and their shrines. Paulinus died on June 22, 431. A later tradition credits him with introducing the use of bells in church — the Latin campana recalls his Campania — which is why he is honored as a patron of bell-ringers, though the story cannot be verified historically. Venerated as a pre-Congregation saint, he is patron of Nola, where his relics, returned from Rome by Pope St. Pius X in 1909, rest in the cathedral. His feast is celebrated on June 22, and Nola's famous 'Festa dei Gigli' each June still honors the saint's memory.