SAINT CATALDUS, BISHOP OF TARENTUM, IN ITALY

HE was a learned Irish monk, who was for some time regent of the great school of Lismore, soon after the death of its founder St. Carthag. To this nursery of learning and virtue prodigious numbers flocked both from the neighboring and remote countries. St. Cataldus at length resigned his charge in quest of some closer retirement, and travelled to Jerusalem; and, in his return into Italy, was chosen bishop of Tarentum, not in the sixth century, as some Italian writers have imagined, much less in the second, but in the decline of the seventh. He is titular saint of the cathedral, the only parish-church of the city, though it is said to contain eighteen thousand inhabitants. St. Cataldus is counted the second bishop. Colgan gives an epitaph placed under an image of St. Cataldus at Rome, which declares his birth, travels, and death, as follows:

Me tulit Iliberne, Solymœ traxere, Tarentum

Nunc tenet: huic ritus, dogmata, jura dedi.

Which are thus Englished by Harris in his edition of Ware’s Irish bishops

Hibernia gave me birth: thence wafted o’er,

I sought the sacred Solymean shore.

To thee, Tarentum, holy rites I gave,

Precepts divine; and thou to me a grave.

See his life written by three Italians, Bartholomew Moronus, Alexander ab Alexandro, and Antony Caraccioli: see also Colgan, t. 1, p. 656, et MSS. ad 10 Maij; and Harris’s Ware, p. 549.