Saint Cyril of Jerusalem

Cyril was born in Jerusalem in 313 or 315, to Christian parents, and almost nothing is known about his youth. Our information comes from his contemporaries Rufinus, Epiphanius and Jerome, and from the historians of the following century — Sozomen, Socrates, Theodoret. He was ordained a priest around 335, and around 350 he became bishop of his city. The years that fell to him were complicated. In the great dispute over the nature of Christ he took a middle position, that of Eusebius of Caesarea: Christ similar to the Father. The Arians didn’t accept it, and neither did the side that would eventually win, Athanasius’s, which held that they were of the same substance. Standing in the middle, in an argument like that, meant displeasing everyone — and in fact Cyril was sent into exile three times. Meanwhile Jerusalem was returning to the center of the world: the emperor’s mother, Helena, had passed through in 323, and from then on the city was no longer just any place. What remains of him are the Catecheses: the instructions he gave to catechumens before and after baptism, in the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre. They are an extraordinary document, because they let us hear what a fourth-century parish was really like — the questions, the objections, the tone in which a bishop spoke to his people. He died in Jerusalem on March 18, 386. Leo XIII proclaimed him a Doctor of the Church in 1882. If your name is Cyril, today is your name day.