St. Juvenal of Jerusalem

Juvenal became bishop of Jerusalem around the year 422 and held the see for some thirty-six years, through the whole of the great christological controversy. He laboured to raise the church of the holy city, which held the very places of the Lord's passion and resurrection, to a dignity answering to its sanctity.

He was present at the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus in 431, where he stood with Cyril of Alexandria in the defence of the title Theotokos and the condemnation of Nestorius. In the troubled years that followed he wavered for a time toward the party of Dioscorus, but at the Fourth Ecumenical Council at Chalcedon in 451 he returned to the Orthodox confession and subscribed the Definition of the faith.

At Chalcedon the dignity of the see of Jerusalem was confirmed, and the three provinces of Palestine were placed under its care, so that Jerusalem took its place among the patriarchates of the Church. When Juvenal returned home, a party of monks who had rejected the council drove him from the city for a season, until imperial authority restored him to his throne.

By an ancient tradition recorded in the Church, it was to Juvenal that the empress Pulcheria turned for the relics of the Mother of God, and he related to her the account of the Dormition and of the empty tomb, the burial garments alone remaining. He governed his church in peace in his later years and reposed on the second of July, 458.

The Church keeps his memory on the second of July, honouring him among the Fathers of two ecumenical councils and as the shepherd under whom Jerusalem was numbered among the great sees of Christendom.