St. Antony Cauleas, Patriarch of Constantinople, Confessor


HE was by extraction of a noble Phrygian family, but born at a country seat near Constantinople, where his parents lived retired for fear of the persecution and infection of the Iconoclasts. From twelve years of age he served God with great fervour, in a monastery of the city, which some moderns pretend to have been that of Studius. In process of time he was chosen abbot, and, upon the death of Stephen, brother to the emperor Leo VI., surnamed the wise, or the Philosopher, patriarch of Constantinople in 893. His predecessor had succeeded Photius in 886, (whom this emperor expelled,) and laboured strenuously to extinguish the schism he had formed, and restore the peace of the church over all the East. St. Antony, completed this great work, and in a council in which he presided at Constantinople, condemned or reformed all that had been done by Photius, during his last usurpation of that see, after the death of St. Ignatius. The acts of this important council are entirely lost, perhaps through the malice of those Greeks who renewed this unhappy schism. A perfect spirit of mortification, penance, and prayer, sanctified this great pastor, both in his private and public life. He died in the year 896, of his age sixty-seven, on the 12th of February, on which day his name is inserted in the Greek Menæa, and in the Roman Martyrology. See an historical panegyric on his virtues, spoken soon after his death by a certain Greek philosopher name Nicephorus, in the Bollandists. Le Quien, Oriens Christianus, t. 3. also t. 1. p. 250.	1

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