HE was born at Tournay, of Christian parents, whose family had been
converted to Christ by St. Piat, one hundred and fifty years before. The
faith had declined at Tournay ever since St. Piat's martyrdom, by reason
of its commerce with the heathen islands of Taxandria, now Zealand, and
by means of the heathen French kings, who resided some time at Tournay.
Eleutherius was chosen bishop of that city in 486; ten years after which
king Clovis was baptized at Rheims. Eleutherius converted the greatest
part of the Franks in that country to the faith, and opposed most
zealously certain heretics who denied the mystery of the Incarnation, by
whom he was wounded on the head with a sword, and died of the wound five
weeks after, on the first of July, in 532. The most ancient monuments,
relating to this saint, seem to have perished in a great fire which
consumed his church, and many other buildings at Tournay, in 1092, with
his relics. See Miraeus, and his life written in the ninth century,
extant in Bollandus, p. 187.[1] Of the sermons ascribed to St.
Eleutherius, in the Library of the Fathers t. 8, none seem sufficiently
warranted genuine, except three on the Incarnation and Birth of Christ,
and the Annunciation. See Dom. Rivet, Hist. Litter., t. 3, p. 154, and
t. 5, pp. 40, 41. Gallia Christ. Nova, t. 3, p. 571, and Henschenius, p
180.
Footnotes:
1. This author wrote before the invasion of the Normans, and the
translation of the saint's relics; but long after the saint's death,
and by making him born in the reign of Dioclesian, yet contemporary
with St. Medard, destroys his own credit. Some years after, another
author much enlarged this life, and inserted a history of the
translation of the relics of this saint, made in 897. A third writer
added a relation of later miracles, and of the translation of these
relics into the city of Tourney, in 1164. All these authors deserve
little notice, except in relating facts of their own time.