Sermons Of Saint Leo The Great, Audiobook, The Holy Roman Catholic Church

• Report rights infringement
• published: 31 Dec 2016
• views: 28

During the disintegration of the Western Empire, when heresy was rife and all moral values were threatened by the barbarian invasions, Pope Leo I stands out as the resolute champion of the faith. His courage and sagacity lifted the prestige of the Holy See mightily, and earned for him the title of "The Great," a distinction bestowed on but one other pope, Gregory I. The Church honored Leo further with the title of Doctor because of his expositions of Christian doctrine, extracts from which are now incorporated in the lessons of the Catholic breviary. Of his birth and early years we have no reliable information; his family was probably Tuscan. We know that he was at Rome as a deacon under Pope Celestine I and Pope Sixtus III, whose pontificates ran from 422 to 440. Leo must have achieved eminence early, for even then he corresponded with Archbishop Cyril of Alexandria,[1] and Cassian dedicated his treatise against Nestorius to him.[2] In 440 Leo was sent to Gaul to try to make peace between the imperial generals, Aetius and Albinus. Soon afterward Pope Sixtus died, and a deputation came up from Rome to inform Leo that he had been elected to the chair of St. Peter. His consecration took place in September of that year, and he at once began to show great energy in the performance of the papal duties. The new pope set himself to make the Roman church a pattern for all other churches. In the ninety-six sermons which have come down to us, we find Leo stressing the virtues of almsgiving, fasting, and prayer, and also expounding Catholic doctrine with clarity and conciseness, in particular the dogma of the Incarnation. He was determined to shield his flock from heresy, and when he discovered that many Manichaeans,[3] who had fled from the Vandals in Africa, had settled in Rome and were spreading their errors, he summoned them before a council of clergy and laymen. Under cross- examination some confessed to immoral practices and some recanted. Against the recalcitrant, Leo invoked the secular authority; their books were burned, and they themselves were banished or else left Rome of their own volition. Meanwhile he was preaching vigorously against the false teaching, as Augustine had done earlier, and writing letters of warning to all the Italian bishops. One hundred and forty-three letters written by him and thirty letters written to him have been preserved; they illustrate the Pope's extraordinary vigilance over the Church in all parts of the Empire. He also encouraged the bishops, especially the Italian ones, to come to Rome to consult him in person. From Spain Turibius, bishop of Astorga, sent Leo a copy of a letter he had been circulating on the heresy of Priscillianism. The sect had made great headway in Spain and some of the Catholic clergy favored it. As it developed there, it seems to have combined astrology and fatalism with the Manichaean theory of the evil of matter. Leo wrote back a long refutation of this doctrine and described the measures he had taken against the Manichaeans in Rome. Several times he was asked to arbitrate affairs in Gaul. Twice he nullified acts of the saintly Hilary, bishop of Arles, who had exceeded his powers. The Emperor Valentinian III in the famous edict of 445 denounced the Gallic bishop and declared "that nothing should be done in Gaul contrary to ancient usage, without the authority of the bishop of Rome, and that the decree of the apostolic see should henceforth be law." Thus was the primacy of Rome given official recognition. One of Leo's letters to Anastasius, bishop of Thessalonica, reminds him that all bishops had a right to appeal to Rome, "according to ancient tradition." In 446 he writes to the African church in Mauretania, forbidding the appointment of a layman to the episcopate, or of any man who had been twice married or who had married a widow. (I Timothy iii,2.) Pope Saint Leo I (c. 400 – 10 November 461), also known as Saint Leo the Great, was pope from 29 September 440 to his death in 461. He was an Italian aristocrat, and was the first pope to have been called "the Great". He is perhaps best known for having met Attila the Hun in 452 and persuading him to turn back from his invasion of Italy. He is also a Doctor of the Church, most remembered theologically for issuing the Tome of Leo, a document which was a major foundation to the debates of the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon. The Council of Chalcedon, the fourth ecumenical council, dealt primarily with Christology, and elucidated the orthodox definition of Christ's being as the hypostatic union of two natures, divine and human, united in one person, "with neither confusion nor division". It was followed by a major schism associated with Monophysitism, Miaphysitism and Dyophysitism. Sermons Of Saint Leo The Great, Audiobook, The Holy Roman Catholic Church