(ABOUT A.D. 596.)
[Roman Martyrology, and those of Usuardus, Notker, Ado, and Bede;
but by the Spanish Church and Mozarabic Kalendar, followed by the
Bollandists, on March 13th. Authorities:--His own writings, the
letters of S. Gregory the Great, and early Spanish histories.]
This illustrious friend of the great S. Gregory, this apostle of the
Visigoths, was of illustrious birth. His father, Severian duke of
Carthagena, and mother, Turtura, of royal Ostrogoth blood, had three
sons and two daughters. The sons were, S. Leander, S. Fulgentius, B.
of Ecija, and S. Isidore, who succeeded Leander as archbishop of
Seville. The daughters were S. Florentina, abbess of fifty convents,
and the princess Theodosia, married to king Leovigild, who became the
mother of the illustrious martyr, S. Hermenigild.
From his boyhood, Leander was regarded as endowed with singular
eloquence and power of fascinating others. He retired, when young,
from the world, and took the religious habit in a monastery of
Seville, where he gained so great a reputation that, on the
archiepiscopal see becoming vacant, he was elected to it by the
unanimous voice of clergy and people.
Leovigild, his brother-in-law, then reigned over the Visigoth kingdom,
in Spain, and openly professed Arianism. This caused great
embarrassment to Leander, who used every effort to confirm the
Catholics in their faith, and to oppose the heretics at every point.
He was sent on an embassy from the Catholics to the emperor Tiberius,
at Constantinople, where he made the acquaintance of S. Gregory the
Great, then cardinal-deacon of Pope Pelagius II., who had sent him at
this time on the affairs of the church, to the imperial court. The
warmest attachment sprang up between these two great men, and it was
at the instance of S. Leander, that S. Gregory wrote his famous
"Morals of the Book of Job." When their business was concluded, both
saints returned to their country, S. Gregory to Italy, and S. Leander
to Spain, where he succeeded in converting prince Hermenigild, his
nephew, the eldest son of king Leovigild. This placed the Catholics in
great danger. The king, in an explosion of rage, executed his son on
Easter-day, 586, and began a furious persecution of the Church. S.
Leander and his brother, S. Fulgentius, together with several other
bishops, were exiled, and the king seized on the property and revenues
of the Church, and, adding cruelty to robbery, put several nobles to
death, and confiscated their lands.
S. Leander, though exiled, warred with his pen against the Arian
heresy, and wrote two works confuting the errors of Arianism, and a
third book answering objections which had been raised against his
arguments.
The persecution did not last long, for in the following year, 587,
Leovigild, finding himself about to die, recalled the Catholic
bishops, and commended his son, Recared, to the care of S. Leander.
Thus, to use the words of S. Gregory, Recared, following not the
perfidy of his father, an Arian, but the faith of his martyred
brother, was brought himself, and the whole nation of the Visigoths,
to the true faith.
In the third council of Toledo, 589, the archbishop of Seville
presiding, a solemn declaration of the consubstantiality of the Divine
Persons was drawn up, and signed by the king, Recared, and his queen,
Badda, daughter of king Arthur, of Britain. Next year another synod
was held at Seville, in which he presided, to establish the complete
conversion of the nation from Arianism to the true faith.
S. Leander died in 596, on March 13th, and his body was laid in the
church of SS. Justus and Rufina. His relics are now preserved in a
chapel of the Cathedral church.
In art, S. Leander appears with (1) a flaming heart in his hand, to
represent his zeal for the conversion of the Visigoths, but this is a
symbol used for a multitude of other saints; or with (2) a pen; or (3)
with Recared or Hermenigild as a boy at his side.