St. Ignatius the God-bearer

Ignatius was born around 35 in Roman Syria — tradition says he was the very child whom the Lord set in the midst of His disciples and said, "Of such is the kingdom of heaven." He was a disciple of the apostle John, and around the year 70 (after the death of Peter) he became the third bishop of Antioch, the first imperial city to be evangelized after Jerusalem and the place where the disciples were first called Christians.

For nearly forty years he led the great Antiochene Church through the difficult second generation after the apostles — when the eyewitnesses were dying out and the gnostic teachers were beginning to spread alternative gospels. About 107 he was arrested during the persecution of the Emperor Trajan and condemned to be sent to Rome to be torn by beasts at the games. Ten Roman soldiers — "ten leopards," he called them, who grew worse the more kindly he treated them — escorted him by ship and overland the eight hundred miles to the capital.

At the seven cities of Asia Minor where the prisoner-train stopped along the way, the local churches came out in deputations to greet him. At Smyrna he met Polycarp; at Troas he wrote five of his seven letters. The letters are to the churches of Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles, Rome, Philadelphia, Smyrna, and to Polycarp personally. They contain the earliest references in Christian literature to the three-fold ministry of bishop, priest, and deacon, the earliest description of the Eucharist as the "medicine of immortality," and the earliest extended use of the word Catholic — "where Christ is, there is the Catholic Church."

The letter to the Romans begs the Roman Christians not to use their influence to spare him from the beasts: "Let me be the food of the wild animals, through whom I can find God. I am God's wheat, and I am ground by the teeth of wild beasts that I may become a pure loaf for Christ." His wish was granted; he was thrown to the lions in the Colosseum on December 20, around 107 or 108. Only the harder bones were found afterward and brought back to Antioch; in 637, before the city's fall to the Saracens, they were translated to Rome. The Church remembers him on December 20 (his martyrdom) and January 29 (the translation of his relics back to Antioch in the fourth century).