St. Hosius of Cordova

Hosius (Ossius in Spanish) was born around the year 256 in Cordova, in Roman Hispania. He was elected to the see of Cordova as a young man, around 295, and held it until his death almost sixty-five years later. In the great persecution under Diocletian he was a confessor: he refused to sacrifice, was tortured, and bore the scars to his grave.

When the Donatist schism broke out in North Africa after the persecution, Constantine sent Hosius into Africa as his ecclesiastical envoy. The two had met and Hosius became, in the years that followed, the closest theological adviser of the Emperor: it was Hosius who travelled with Constantine's letter to Alexander and Arius in 324 attempting to settle the controversy in advance, and it was Hosius who, when that letter failed, advised the Emperor to summon the Ecumenical Council.

At Nicaea, Hosius is the first signatory in every surviving subscription list. The Western tradition has read this as evidence that he presided over the council's sessions; the Eastern tradition gives the opening oration to Eustathius of Antioch and the chief theological work to Alexander and Athanasius. Both are right that he was the elder of the West, and that his subscription gave the council its weight in the Latin churches.

He returned to his see in Spain and to a long old age. He held Cordova for another thirty years. He presided over the Council of Sardica in 343, the great Western synod that vindicated Athanasius against the eastern Arians.

In his last years the Arianizing Emperor Constantius II ordered him brought to Sirmium and pressed him to sign one of the Arianizing formulae of the 350s. He was over a hundred years old. He held out under threats and beatings for a long time, and at length, under torture, his hand was guided to subscribe a compromise formula. On his deathbed in 359 he recanted that subscription and confessed the Nicene Faith in full. The Church kept his memory as a Confessor: a man whose lifelong testimony was not overturned by what was extorted from him at the end.