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St. Germanus of Capua
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Saints and feasts
St. Germanus of Capua
Bishop of Capua, Confessor
Germanus, bishop of Capua, served as a papal legate in the restoration of communion with Constantinople in 519. St. Gregory’s Dialogues also preserve accounts connecting him with prayer for the dead and St. Benedict.
The reading
ⓘ Butler source
Alban Butler, The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints, Volume X (October), Thomas Richardson and Son, Derby, for the Catholic Book Society, 1846; October 30, “St Germanus, Bishop of Capua, Confessor,” pp. 686-687.
Germanus was bishop of Capua and one of the legates whom Pope Hormisdas sent to Constantinople in 519. Their mission was to restore communion after the division associated with Acacius. Butler describes the embassy as successful, while noting the difficulties and opposition faced by the legates.
St. Gregory the Great also preserves Germanus’s name in his Dialogues. One account associates him with prayer for a deceased Roman deacon named Paschasius. Butler adds a caution about the transmission of this story: Gregory had received it as a child from older witnesses. It should be read as a reported account from the Dialogues, rather than as Germanus’s own written testimony.
Another passage in the Dialogues tells of St. Benedict seeing the soul of Germanus carried to heaven at the time of his death. Butler places that death about 540. These are the principal notices in the short life: a bishop engaged in the restoration of Church unity and a saint remembered in Gregory’s account of Benedict.
Historical note
An original Novena Regina reading adapted and summarized from the cited 1846 edition of Alban Butler. This is not a transcription of Butler’s words.
The vision accounts are attributed to Gregory’s Dialogues. Butler’s own caution about the reported transmission of the Paschasius episode is preserved.
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