Leandro of Seville, Saint

LEANDRO OF SEVILLE, Saint. - Born in Cartagena, to a Roman family, before 549, died in Seville on 13 March 600 or 601. First a Benedictine monk and then metropolitan of Seville, his name is bound to the principal events of that crucial era. He had great influence in the conversion of St. Hermenegild and was therefore exiled by the latter's father, Leovigild (569-86). Around 580-82 L. was in Constantinople on a diplomatic mission on behalf of the Visigothic Church, and there he formed a friendship with the future St. Gregory the Great, whom he induced to write the Moralia.

L.'s great work was the evangelization of the Visigoths and the conversion of Reccared, followed by that of his people and solemnly ratified in the Third Council of Toledo (580): it "was the work of faith and of industry" of L., as his brother St. Isidore affirms. The solemn sermon delivered on that occasion by L. is one of the rare examples of the oratorical genre among the Visigoths.

Two anti-Arian polemical writings and the epistolary of L., mentioned by St. Isidore, have been lost. There remains, however, the short treatise De institutione virginum et de contemptu mundi, dedicated to his sister Florentina, followed by 31 chapters of an ascetic-disciplinary character. The work is a jewel of ascetic literature, where amid copious reminiscences of the letters of St. Jerome, the Rule of St. Augustine, Cassian and others, one discerns a personal manner less of nobility and pernicate than of affectionate simplicity.

He is inscribed in the Roman Martyrology under 27 February; in Spain he is venerated as a doctor.

Giuseppe Madoz