Septimius Coelius Gaudiosus, known to later ages as Gaudiosus the African or Gaudiosus of Naples, was born in the late fourth century in Roman North Africa, of Berber stock, and became bishop of Abitina, a town near Carthage in the province of Africa. Little is recorded of his youth, yet by 439 he stood as shepherd of that flock when the Vandals under King Genseric seized Carthage and pressed the Catholic bishops to abandon the Nicene faith for Arianism.
Genseric offered Gaudiosus the chance to remain bishop of Abitina if he would embrace the Arian heresy. The saint refused. Together with Quodvultdeus, bishop of Carthage, and other clergy, he was placed aboard a worn vessel stripped of sails and oars and cast adrift upon the Mediterranean. By God's providence the helpless craft crossed the Tyrrhenian Sea and reached the shores of Naples about the year 439.
Settling on the hill of Capodimonte outside the ancient city, in the district later called the Rione Sanità, Gaudiosus gathered his companions and founded a monastery under the Rule of Saint Augustine—then still unknown in Italy. There he introduced African baptismal customs and, according to tradition, translated the relics of the Carthaginian martyr Saint Restituta, which were enshrined in the church that still bears her name within the cathedral of Naples. He lived among the Neapolitan faithful as a confessor-bishop, consoling fellow exiles and handing on the spiritual inheritance of the African Church.
Gaudiosus died in Naples on 27 October 455. Bishop Nostrianus arranged his burial in the catacombs; one cemetery of the Catacombs of San Gennaro has ever since been called the Catacombs of San Gaudioso. In the eighth century Bishop Stephen II of Naples transferred portions of his relics to churches of Campania. Though some later writers styled him a martyr because exile broke his heart, the Church venerates him as a confessor who preferred orthodoxy and exile to comfort and heresy. His memory is kept on 27 October.
May Saint Gaudiosus obtain for us the courage to hold fast to the Catholic faith amid every trial, and the charity to welcome the stranger as Christ Himself.
