St. Barbatus of Benevento

Who was St. Barbatus of Benevento?

St. Barbatus of Benevento was a seventh-century Italian priest who became bishop of Benevento and led its Lombard rulers away from the last of their pagan customs. He was born near Benevento about 610, toward the end of the pontificate of St. Gregory the Great, and he died there in 682. We keep his feast on February 19.

Our main account of his life is the one Alban Butler drew in the eighteenth century from "two authentic lives" printed by the Bollandists. Butler gives his name as "Barbatus, or Barbas"; in Italy he is San Barbato.

The life of St. Barbatus

A hard first parish

Barbatus was raised a Christian and was ordained a priest as soon as the canons allowed. His bishop put him to preaching, for which Butler says he "had an extraordinary talent," and then made him parish priest of St. Basil's at Morcone, a town near Benevento.

It went badly. His parishioners did not want to be woken from their sins, Butler writes, and when his patience outlasted their hostility they turned to slander. He had to withdraw from the parish and return to Benevento, where people who knew him received him gladly. Butler saw this failure as the fire that freed his heart from earthly attachments.

The golden serpent and the sacred tree

Benevento was then the seat of a Lombard duchy. Its people were partly Christian, partly Arian and partly pagan, and even the Christians held on to old superstitions, with their duke Romuald leading by example. Butler describes two of them. They venerated a golden viper and bowed down before it. They also honored a tree, on which they hung the skin of a wild beast, and held games in which archers shot arrows over their shoulders at the skin.

Barbatus preached against these practices for a long time with no result. He added fasting and prayer. Then he warned the city that it would suffer at the hands of the Emperor Constans II, and soon afterward the emperor landed in Italy and laid siege to Benevento in 663.

In their fear, the people listened. They renounced their idols, and Barbatus promised them that the siege would be lifted and the emperor beaten, which happened as he said. Butler counts this among the saint's prophecies; we label it traditional, drawn from his early lives.

Barbatus then cut down the sacred tree with his own hands. Italian tradition remembers it as a walnut tree, the famous noce of Benevento.

He melted down the golden viper too. Butler says he made it into a chalice; the Catholic Encyclopedia calls it a paten and adds that this sacred vessel was kept in Benevento until the French invasion of 1799.

Bishop of Benevento

Bishop Ildebrand died during the siege, and once peace returned Barbatus was consecrated bishop on March 10, 663. He finished the work he had begun, Butler writes, and rooted out every trace of superstition, from the prince's private rooms to the whole state.

In 680 he took part in the council Pope Agatho held in Rome, and the next year in the Sixth Ecumenical Council at Constantinople, which condemned the Monothelite heresy. He did not long survive it. He died in 682, about seventy years old, after nearly nineteen years as bishop.

The miracles of St. Barbatus

His early lives credit him with foretelling both the siege and its end. These are traditional accounts. The documented fruit of his life is the conversion of a city's rulers and the end of the cult of the serpent and the tree, which the Church of Benevento remembered for centuries.

Why St. Barbatus is the patron of Benevento

Butler says he is "honoured at Benevento among the chief patrons of that city." He was the bishop who brought its Lombard rulers fully into the Christian faith, and the city's Christian identity was in large part his work.

Symbols of St. Barbatus in art

• Bishop's miter and crozier: his office as bishop of Benevento.
• Axe or a felled tree: the sacred walnut tree he cut down.
• Serpent: the golden viper the Lombards venerated, sometimes shown beneath his feet.
• Chalice: the vessel he made from the melted idol.

In southern Italian churches, look for a bearded bishop with a snake or a tree beside him. In the old engraving on this page, demons fly out of the tree as it falls, a way of showing that the worship of the idol had ended.

Feast day and prayer

We keep his feast on February 19, the day the Roman Martyrology names him. The Archdiocese of Benevento keeps it as the feast of one of its patrons.

There is no traditional prayer to St. Barbatus in standard English prayer books. Butler drew a lesson from his life: many people turn to God in fear and forget him when the danger passes, so Barbatus took care that his people's first repentance would grow into a real change of heart. Let us ask him to pray that our own conversions last, and that we let go of whatever idols we still keep. St. Barbatus, pray for us.