Patiens was a son of Lyon, seemingly born of one of the great families of that city, in an age when the Roman order in Gaul was collapsing under Visigothic arms and the Church remained almost the only shelter of the poor. Of his childhood and youth nothing is recorded; the light falls upon him only when he ascends the episcopal chair. In the most ancient episcopal catalogue of Lyon, preserved in a Gospel book of the mid-ninth century and drawn up around 799–814 in the days of Bishop Leidrade from the original diptychs of the Church of Lyon, his name stands in the twentieth place, between Saint Eucherius, who died on 16 November 449, and Saint Lupicinus, whose ministry preceded 494/495. He succeeded Eucherius most probably in the year 450, and he is believed to have shepherded the diocese for some forty years.
Almost everything known of his ministry comes from the letters of his friend Sidonius Apollinaris, who became bishop in the Auvergne about 469/470 and who never wearied of praising him. Sidonius records his great charity, his love of the humble, the care and beauty he lavished upon the churches of his city, and the striking paradox of his life: that although his own table and manner of living were severe and austere, he made himself, in the words of the Apostle, "all things to all men." He was a cultivated man; tradition attributes to him the theological work known as the Dogmata ecclesiastica, or De ecclesiasticis dogmatibus, and a number of homilies, though the ascription of the sermons is uncertain.
He built with the zeal of one who loved God's house. To Patiens is owed the church of the Holy Apostles, later dedicated to Saint Nicetius, consecrated between 469 and 471; for its dedication Sidonius Apollinaris composed a poem inscribed upon its walls. Tradition also credits him with the completion or rebuilding of the great church of Saint Stephen at Lyon — the cathedral on whose site the baptistery of Saint John would later rise, and in time the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist — and with the founding of new churches and the restoration of ancient sanctuaries throughout his see. It was Patiens, too, who commissioned Constantius of Lyon to write the Vita Germani, the Life of Saint Germanus of Auxerre, so that the memory of a holy bishop might instruct the generations to come.
His pastoral zeal was not confined to stone and parchment. He took his part in the councils of his time: about the year 470 he intervened in the vexed question of the episcopal election at Chalon-sur-Saône, and himself consecrated the new bishop, John. In 474 or 475 he sat in the Council of Arles which condemned the priest Lucidus of Riez for heterodox teaching on predestination; his name appears sixth in the synodal letter, between Mamertus of Vienne and Veranus of Vence. At a council held in Lyon about 475, whose acts are now lost, further errors of Lucidus were condemned, and on that occasion Patiens laid before the assembled fathers his own theological composition, the Dogmata ecclesiastica. Among the Arians he carried on a patient apostolate, and by his teaching and still more by the example of his life he brought a number of them back to the Catholic faith. He was a friend of Chilperic, the Catholic king of the Burgundians, and maintained contact even with Euric, the Arian king of the Visigoths.
But it is above all as the father of the poor that Gaul remembered him. During the great famine of 472–475, caused in part by the plundering and devastation of Euric's Visigothic troops, Patiens poured out his own resources without reserve. He bought wheat and had it carried by boat along the Rhône and the Saône, and distributed it free of charge not only to his own people at Lyon but to the populations of Arles, Avignon and Valence, and as far as Riez and Clermont. Sidonius Apollinaris, astonished at such generosity, celebrated it as the act of a bishop who fed whole provinces from his own granaries; by that charity Patiens showed that the Church's wealth belongs to the hungry.
The letters of Sidonius say nothing of his death or of his successor, so it is likely that Patiens outlived his friend, dying between 480 and 494 — certainly before 494, the year by which his second successor, Rusticius, was in office. He died on 11 September and was buried at Saint-Just in Lyon. His name is entered in the oldest episcopal catalogue of the city and in a second catalogue reported by Hugh of Flavigny in his Chronica universalis of the twelfth century. The oldest liturgical witness to his cult is the Hieronymian Martyrology of the fifth or sixth century, which sets his commemoration on 11 September; from there it passed into the Roman Martyrology compiled by Baronius and into the martyrology revised after the Second Vatican Council. Both the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church honour him on that day.
Let us ask Saint Patiens of Lyon to obtain for us his open-handed charity, that we too may be austere with ourselves and generous with the hungry, becoming today all things to all men for the sake of Christ.
