Saint Ambrose

Around 370 Ambrose was sent to govern Emilia and Liguria from Milan, which made him the most senior imperial magistrate in northern Italy. ¹ It was a serious career and he was on the ordinary track for it.

When the Arian bishop Auxentius died, the city split between the Arian and Catholic parties, and Ambrose went to keep the peace. The people acclaimed him bishop instead, although he was still a catechumen. ¹ He was baptized, ordained, and consecrated in the space of a few days.

Augustine came to Milan as a professional rhetorician with no intention of being converted by anybody. What undid him was partly Ambrose himself and partly the sight of a whole church at prayer together. ¹ More specifically, Ambrose taught him how to read Scripture, and the intellectual objection that had kept Augustine out simply stopped working.

Ambrose is the reason lectio divina entered the Western Church. ¹ Reading Scripture slowly, as prayer rather than as study, is his bequest, and it produced Augustine as a side effect.

In 386 the imperial court demanded a church building in Milan for Arian worship. Ambrose refused. His people filled the basilica and stayed there, and Benedict XVI records that they were ready to die alongside their bishop. ¹ The court backed down.

It is one of the first times in Western history that a bishop told an emperor no and made it stick. Everything later Europe assumed about the limits of state power over the Church has some of its root in that standoff.

The line of his that Benedict XVI keeps returning to is four words in Latin: Omnia Christus est nobis. To us, Christ is all. ¹

Ambrose died on Holy Saturday, April 3 or 4 in 397, having received communion, at about fifty-seven. ¹² The Church counts him among the four great Latin Doctors. ²

Neither source used here states a patronage for Saint Ambrose, and this profile does not supply one. ¹² Beekeepers are the popular answer, and they appear in neither Benedict XVI's audience nor the encyclopedia article. What the sources give him instead of a patronage is a rank: one of the four great Latin Doctors of the Church. ²

His feast is December 7, the anniversary of his consecration as bishop rather than of his death. ² Milan, which acclaimed him, still keeps it as a civic occasion.

He was drafted. He had not trained for it, had not asked for it, and was not even baptized when the crowd decided. ¹ Plenty of people end up responsible for something they never applied for, and he is the patron of doing it well anyway.

What changed Augustine was not an argument. It was being shown a better way to read. ¹ If Scripture has gone flat or strange on somebody you love, that is worth remembering before the next debate.

He put his own body and his congregation between an emperor and a church building. ¹ Courage in Ambrose is not rhetorical; it is standing somewhere and declining to move.

Omnia Christus est nobis. ¹ Four words, and he spent twenty-three years as a bishop trying to mean them.