Saint Martin of Braga

Martin was born in Pannonia, in what is now Hungary, about 520 by the Catholic Encyclopedia's reckoning, and between 510 and 520 by ACI Prensa's. ¹³⁴ ACI Prensa adds that his origin is known from the epitaph for his tomb, which he wrote himself. ⁴ The encyclopedia lists an "Epistaphium" among the three short verse inscriptions of his that survive. ¹

He made a pilgrimage to Palestine and became a monk there. ¹ ACI Prensa says he gave his time in the Holy Land to prayer, mortification and the study of Greek, which opened the early Fathers to him, and that he passed through Rome on his way west. ⁴ In Palestine, the encyclopedia says, he met pilgrims from Spain whose accounts of their country persuaded him to go to Galicia, in the northwest of the peninsula, to convert the Sueves, "some of whom were still half pagans and others Arians." ¹ He arrived in 550. ¹³

The Sueves had settled in Galicia and made Braga their capital. ³⁴ ACI Prensa, in its Spanish account, says they had fallen into Arianism through the work of a missionary named Ajax, a Galatian sent by Theodoric. ⁴

ACI Prensa also retells the story Gregory of Tours gives of the Suevic king Chararic. ⁴ The king, an Arian, sent an embassy to the tomb of Saint Martin of Tours to ask healing for his son; the first embassy failed, and the second carried the boy's weight in gold and silver and the king's promise to become a Catholic if his son recovered. ⁴ The son was healed, and that was the occasion for leaving Arianism. ⁴ ACI Prensa calls Gregory an eyewitness to the embassies, and says plainly that his account carries the dust of legend. ⁴

The Martyrology itself is more sparing: it says only that through Martin's zeal and preaching the Sueves left the Arian heresy and embraced the Catholic faith. ⁵ The 1907 encyclopedia article on Braga quotes Isidore of Seville to the same effect, that Martin "converted the Suevic inhabitants from the errors of Arianism, taught them Catholic doctrine and discipline, strengthened their ecclesiastical organization, and founded monasteries." ² ACI Prensa says Isidore dates the conversion to 560. ⁴

Near Braga he founded the monastery of Dumio, and became its abbot and then its bishop. ¹² The Archdiocese of Braga's own short biography, by the historian José Marques, says he was named bishop in 556 of the tiny diocese of Dume, which was made up of the monastery and its lands. ³ The encyclopedia gives no year for the appointment and says only that he signed the synod of Braga in May 561 as bishop of Dumio. ¹

Marques describes him working closely with the metropolitan, Lucretius, to prepare that first council, which aimed at unity in the Catholic faith, in church discipline and in the liturgy, and which condemned the Priscillianism, Arianism and other teachings then current in Suevic Galicia. ³ ACI Prensa says the council of 561 saw the conversion of the king and the people. ⁴

When Lucretius died, Martin succeeded him as metropolitan. ³ Marques credits him with the division of Suevic Galicia into thirteen dioceses and 130 parishes, presented at an assembly at Lugo in 569 and promulgated by King Miro, which he calls the foundation of the diocesan map of the northwest of the peninsula. ³ As archbishop, Martin presided over the second Council of Braga in 572. ¹³ The encyclopedia says he succeeded in converting the Arian Galicians and in "rooting out the last remnants of paganism among them." ¹

Most of what Martin wrote is short, and the encyclopedia sorts it into moral, liturgical and ascetical works. ¹ The best known is the Formula vitae honestae, a guide to the Christian life chiefly for lay people, built on the four cardinal virtues and believed to draw on a lost work of Seneca; his De ira is a summary of Seneca's three books on anger. ¹ Three other treatises, against vanity and pride and in praise of humility, set out Christian morality directly. ¹

For the clergy he compiled eighty-four canons, drawn mostly from Greek councils, which the encyclopedia calls of great importance in the history of medieval canon law. ¹ Marques sees in that collection, and in the translations from Greek made at Dumio, the Eastern side of his work. ³ Martin translated a collection of sayings of the Egyptian desert fathers himself, and had a deacon of Dumio, Paschasius, translate another under his direction. ¹⁴

He wrote on the date of Easter, and answered a Spanish bishop who suspected that baptism by triple immersion was an Arian custom. ¹ His sermon De correctione rusticorum, the encyclopedia says, was aimed at the pagan superstitions still common among the country people of his diocese. ¹ Marques adds that it fought the naming of the days of the week after the gods of the Roman planets, and that the Christian names that followed are the ones Portugal still uses. ³

Gregory of Tours called him "plenus virtutibus," full of virtue, and said he so steeped himself in letters that he was "second to none of his contemporaries in learning," in the encyclopedia's rendering. ¹ The article on Braga calls him the most famous of that see's early bishops, "noted for his wisdom and holiness." ²

Isidore, as the same article quotes him, adds that Martin left letters recommending "a reform of manners, a life of faith and prayer, and giving of alms, the constant practice of all virtues and the love of God." ²

No source used for this page names Saint Martin of Braga as patron of anything. ¹³⁴ ACI Prensa calls him the apostle of the Sueves, which is a description of his work and not a patronage. ⁴

Saint Martin of Braga's feast day is March 20. ¹⁵ The Catholic Encyclopedia gives that date, and the current Roman Martyrology enters him on March 20 at Braga, in Portugal, as the bishop from Pannonia who held first the see of Dumio and then that of Braga. ¹⁵ Neither source gives the day of the month on which he died. ¹⁵

He went a long way to become a monk, and then went a long way again because some pilgrims told him about a country that needed the faith. ¹ The people he came to were not his own, and he spent the rest of his life among them. ¹³

Much of his work was patient and unglamorous: councils, canons, the drawing of diocesan boundaries, a sermon for country people about the names of the days. ¹³ The Martyrology remembers it as zeal and preaching. ⁵

His own writing begins from the four cardinal virtues and from Seneca, and then turns to humility and the danger of pride. ¹ Isidore remembered him urging faith and prayer, almsgiving, and the love of God. ²