St. Ennodius

St. Ennodius was born Magnus Felix Ennodius in 473 or 474, of a Gallo-Roman family, and after a worldly youth in Italy embraced the service of the Church, becoming a deacon at Milan and eventually bishop of Pavia about 514. He belonged to the cultivated Christian aristocracy of Ostrogothic Italy, when Roman letters still flourished under barbarian kings, and he was among the notable Latin writers of that late-antique world.

A polished rhetorician, poet, and letter-writer in the ornate style of his day, he left a large and varied body of works: panegyrics, poems, model speeches, saints' lives, and above all a great collection of letters that shed valuable light on the society and Church of his time. He is remembered too for writing in defense of the authority of the pope during a Roman synod, and he was later sent on papal missions to Constantinople in the effort to heal a schism between the Churches of East and West. He died in 521, and is venerated as a saint, his memory kept on 17 July.