Sacerdos was born at Lyon in the year 487, into a Gallo-Roman patrician family that had given the Church of Gaul a whole line of holy pastors. His father was St. Rusticus, bishop of Lyon at the close of the fifth century; tradition names his mother as Hiberia of Limoges and reckons him also a kinsman of St. Viventiolus of Lyon. Into that household the faith had passed as a family inheritance, and Sacerdos received it not as a formality but as a way of life.
Before his call to the episcopate he lived in the married state, and from this marriage was born a son, Aurelianus, who himself became Archbishop of Arles from 546 until his death in 551 — one of the rare instances in which father and son are both honoured as saints. Sacerdos's epitaph records that his son was buried with him, a touching sign of how closely their two lives had been joined in the service of the Gospel.
The exact year in which he ascended the see of Lyon is not recorded, but it falls between 538 and 549. The oldest catalogue of the bishops of Lyon, preserved in a gospel book of the mid-ninth century and compiled about 799–814, sets his name in the twenty-seventh place, between Leontius and St. Nicetius. Hugh of Flavigny, in his universal chronicle, adds only the brief historical note: "Saint Sacerdos, in the time of Childebert." A later catalogue records the works by which Lyon remembered him: "Sacerdos, the church of St. Paul and of St. Eulalia."
Those two churches — the Église Saint-Paul and the church of Saint Eulalia, attached to a monastery of nuns and later rededicated to Saint George — were built or rebuilt by his care. Leidrad, bishop of Lyon a little more than two centuries afterwards, reported on them to Charlemagne, and the surviving fragments of an ancient Life of Sacerdos, now otherwise lost, speak of this building work. A bishop who raises houses of prayer for his people preaches without speaking; Sacerdos wished the faithful of Lyon to have places worthy of the mysteries they celebrated.
His holiness and prudence made him a trusted counsellor of King Childebert I, whose reign (534–558) spanned the whole of his episcopate. Sacerdos used that influence not for himself but for the poor: he is credited with moving the king toward the foundation of a hospice in Lyon, set between the church of Saint-Paul and the first bridge of the Change. On 28 October 549 he presided over the Fifth Council of Orléans, the great assembly of the Gallican bishops, and there the erection of that hospital in Lyon, willed by King Childebert and his queen Ultrogotha, was solemnly ratified. Thus the pastoral authority of a council was placed at the service of the sick and the destitute.
St. Gregory of Tours has preserved the account of his last days. In 552 Sacerdos travelled to Paris for a council summoned to settle the troubles that had arisen over the Parisian see after the deposition of its bishop Saffaracus. There he fell gravely ill and could neither take part in the sessions nor sign their acts. King Childebert, whose adviser he had long been, came to his bedside. The dying bishop's last concern was not for himself but for the flock he was leaving: he obtained from the king that his nephew Nicetius — St. Nicetius of Lyon — should succeed him on the cathedra of Lyon. So it came to pass, and Nicetius governed Lyon in sanctity after him.
According to his epitaph, Sacerdos died on 11 September 552, aged sixty-five. A short time later his remains were carried home to Lyon and buried in the church of the Apostles, afterwards dedicated to Saint Nicetius; a fragment of the original epitaph, long known only from a medieval transcription, was rediscovered in 1883 in the church of Saint-Nizier at Lyon, where a statue still honours him.
His cult is ancient. The earliest liturgical witness is the Hieronymian Martyrology of the fifth or sixth century, which places his commemoration on 12 September; the Martyrology of Lyon and the Roman Martyrology edited by Baronius keep the same day, while the Roman Martyrology revised after the Second Vatican Council commemorates the holy bishop on 11 September, the day of his death. Honoured as a saint from time immemorial, he needed no formal process to be recognized by the Church he had served.
Sacerdos teaches us that holiness is handed on within families and poured out upon the poor: he received the faith from a saintly father, gave a saintly son to the Church of Arles, prepared a saintly successor for Lyon, and spent his own credit at court to build a hospital and restore the houses of God.
Let us ask Saint Sacerdos of Lyon to obtain for us a like generosity, and today use whatever influence we possess for the sake of the sick and the poor rather than for ourselves.
