Saint Julian of Brioude

The Roman Martyrology, as the Italian bishops print it, is careful. Translated here, it says: at Brioude near Clermont-Ferrand, in Aquitaine, in France, Saint Julian, martyr, who came to this territory at the invitation of Saint Ferreolus during the persecution, and who is said by tradition to have won the palm of martyrdom there. ¹

Almost everything else comes from Gregory of Tours, the sixth-century bishop, whose family belonged to the Auvergne. ² His book On the Passion and Miracles of Saint Julian, written in Latin, opens with a short account of the martyrdom and then spends nearly fifty chapters on what happened at Julian's tomb, much of it in Gregory's own lifetime and some of it to his own family. ² The book's closing line calls Julian "our own particular patron," translated here from the Latin. ²

Gregory says, translated from the Latin, that Julian "was born in the city of Vienne and was given to the Auvergne as a martyr." ² While he lived with "the most blessed Ferreolus," he already burned for martyrdom, and when persecution broke out at Vienne he left his wealth and his family and went to the Auvergne. ² He went, Gregory insists, not for fear of death but because Christ had said, if they persecute you in one city, flee to another, and because he feared that his own family would stand in his way if he faced the contest among them. ²

Others tell it differently. The diocese of Grenoble, quoted on Nominis, the French bishops' site, makes Julian a legionary and Ferreolus a centurion of the same legion, and says that Ferreolus, who kept his faith quiet, warned Julian, who did not, and urged him to flee. ⁴ A Paris parish quoted there calls him a tribune. ⁴

At Brioude, Gregory says, a village where pagan rites were still kept, Julian learned that his pursuers were close and asked a widow to hide him. ² She hid him, and then, at his own request, gave him up. "I do not wish to stay longer in this world," Gregory has him say to them, "for I thirst for Christ with all my soul." ² They drew a sword and cut off his head. ²

Gregory says the martyr was divided three ways: his head was carried to Vienne, his body was buried at Brioude, and his soul was received by Christ. ² The old men who buried his body were so restored, he adds, that in extreme old age they seemed young again. ² The diocese of Le Puy, on Nominis, names them Arcons and Ilpize. ⁴

How the head reached Vienne is told three ways. Gregory says Ferreolus received it and that, after his own martyrdom, Julian's head and Ferreolus's body were laid in one tomb. ² The Grenoble and Le Puy accounts say the soldiers carried it back to Vienne as proof that they had done their work. ⁴ Sidonius Apollinaris, writing in the fifth century, says it was "the executioner's gory hand" that "brought" it "to the raging persecutor." ³

Gregory tells the rest as the sacristan at Vienne told it to him. On the apse of Ferreolus's church he read a couplet, translated here: this hall holds two heroes of Christ, Julian by his head and Ferreolus by his body. ² When Bishop Mamertus of Vienne moved Ferreolus's relics to a new church, the diggers found three tombs, and in the third a body still whole, its own head cut off, holding another head in its arm. ² Sidonius wrote to Mamertus that it had been granted to him alone in the West since Ambrose to translate the relics of two martyrs, "all the holy body of Ferreolus, and the head of our martyr Julian," and asked, since a part of "our patronal saint" had gone to Vienne, for some share in Vienne's protection. ²³

Where Julian was struck down, Gregory says, there was a clear spring of sweet water in which his persecutors had washed his severed head, and its water was given to the sick. ² The diocese of Le Puy, on Nominis, places the fountain about two kilometers from Brioude on the road to Clermont. ⁴

Gregory tells of a pagan temple near the martyr's tomb, with images of Mars and Mercury on a tall column. ² After a storm that followed a priest's prayer at the tomb, he says, the people asked for baptism, broke the statues they had worshiped and threw them into a lake near the village, and from that time the Catholic faith and the martyr's power were more widely known there. ² Nominis, quoting Le Puy, says that the first Christian community at Brioude probably gathered around his tomb, and that it was because of his martyrdom that Brioude entered history. ⁴

The shrine was not always safe. When King Theuderic invaded the Auvergne, Gregory writes, soldiers broke into the church at Brioude, where the people had taken refuge with their goods, and carried off both. ² The king, hearing of it, punished some of them, and returned everything that had been taken; he had already forbidden, Gregory says, any violence within seven miles of the church. ²

Several of Gregory's chapters are about his own people. His uncle Gallus, later bishop of Clermont, walked to Brioude as an orphaned boy after the king's army had stripped his family of everything, ran a thorn into his bare foot, and found it gone after a night of prayer at the tomb; as a bishop, Gregory says, he used to show the scar. ² On the way to Julian's festival, Gregory's older brother Peter fell ill with fever and was cured after keeping the night vigil at the tomb. ²

The next year it was Gregory himself, with a headache from the sun that turned to fever. ² He went to the church of Saint Ferreolus near Brioude, about ten stadia from the village, beside the spring, poured its water over his head, and says the pain left him at once. ² After he became bishop of Tours he brought threads from the cloth over Julian's tomb, and placed them in a church that monks at Tours had built in Julian's honor. ²

Gregory also tells how the day of the feast was found. For a long time, he says, the people did not know on what day to keep it, until Saint Germanus of Auxerre came to Brioude, asked, was told that no one knew, and after a night of prayer told the elders that it should be kept on the fifth day before the Kalends of September. ² That is August 28. ¹²

No patronage in the usual sense is recorded for Saint Julian of Brioude in the sources used here, and none is claimed. He was a patron of a place and a family: Sidonius, bishop of Clermont, calls him "our patronal saint," and Gregory of Tours closes his book by asking Julian, his own patron, to plead for him before God. ²³

Saint Julian of Brioude's feast day is August 28. The Roman Martyrology enters him on that day, and Gregory of Tours says the date was fixed by Saint Germanus of Auxerre. ¹² Nominis notes that the diocese of Le Puy keeps him on August 30, and files the account from the diocese of Grenoble under the same day. ⁴

The oldest account of his death takes a few sentences: a widow who hid him, a sword. ² What follows in Gregory is nearly three hundred years of people coming to his grave with fevers and lost horses and stolen silver, and a bishop writing them down. ²

In Gregory's telling, Julian left Vienne so that his family could not hold him back, and when he was hidden he asked to be given up. ² It is not an easy example, and Gregory does not make it one. ²

His head and his friend's body lay in one grave, and the couplet on the apse called them two heroes of Christ. ² Whether the story of the tomb is exactly true, two cities a long way apart were proud to share him. ²³