Saint Ambrose

Saint Ambrose was bishop of Milan and is one of the four great Doctors of the Latin Church. Before he was baptized, he was a high imperial official. As a shepherd he defended the Nicene faith against Arianism and the freedom of the Church before the emperors. The Church commemorates him on December 7, the anniversary of his ordination as bishop.

He was born in Trier, where his father was prefect of Gaul. We do not know the exact year of his birth; it is usually placed around 340. The family was Christian, but Ambrose, as often happened at the time, long remained a catechumen. After his father’s death his mother took him to Rome, where he was educated in rhetoric and law.

Around 370 he became the imperial governor of Aemilia and Liguria, with his seat in Milan. The Church there, led for nearly twenty years by the Arian bishop Auxentius, was deeply divided. When, after Auxentius’s death, a dispute arose over his successor, Ambrose came to calm the assembly, and it was he whom the people acclaimed as bishop. He resisted the election because he felt unprepared, but in the end he yielded. He was baptized on November 30, 374, and on December 7 he received episcopal ordination.

The new bishop began by studying. With the help of the priest Simplicianus, later his successor, he studied Sacred Scripture and the early Church writers, especially Origen. From this reading grew his sermons and writings: commentaries on the books of the Bible and treatises on the faith, on the Holy Spirit, and on virginity. He spoke up for the poor and denounced usury. He also composed hymns that the faithful sang in church, and the liturgy of the Church of Milan is called Ambrosian to this day.

Toward imperial authority he was loyal but firm. In 384 he opposed the restoration of the altar of the goddess Victory in the Senate. When in 385 and 386 the court demanded that one of the basilicas be handed over to the Arians, he refused, and the faithful kept vigil with him in the surrounded churches until the authorities gave way. After the massacre of the inhabitants of Thessalonica, carried out in 390 by order of Emperor Theodosius, he called the ruler to penance, and Theodosius performed it publicly.

In Milan a young rhetorician, Augustine, listened to his sermons. More than the bishop’s eloquence, what moved him was the witness of a Church that prayed and sang together with its shepherd. He also remembered that Ambrose read Sacred Scripture in silence, with his eyes alone. At the Easter Vigil of 387 Ambrose baptized him.

He died in Milan at dawn on Holy Saturday, April 4, 397. His biographer Paulinus recorded that from the afternoon of the previous day he prayed with his arms outstretched in the form of a cross, and that just before his death he received the Body of the Lord. He rests in the Milan basilica that bears his name. Ambrose has been venerated as a saint since antiquity, without a formal canonization, and he is the patron of Milan. In 1996, ahead of the sixteen-hundredth anniversary of his death, John Paul II devoted the apostolic letter Operosam diem to him.