CNA Staff, Oct 17, 2025 / 04:00 am

On Oct. 17, the Roman Catholic Church remembers the early Church Father, bishop, and martyr St. Ignatius of Antioch, whose writings attest to the sacramental and hierarchical nature of the Church from its earliest days.

Eastern Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians celebrate his memory on Dec. 20.

In a 2007 general audience on St. Ignatius of Antioch, Pope Benedict XVI observed that “no Church Father has expressed the longing for union with Christ and for life in him with the intensity of Ignatius.”

In his letters, the pope said, “one feels the freshness of the faith of the generation which had still known the apostles. In these letters, the ardent love of a saint can also be felt.”

Born in Syria in the middle of the first century A.D., Ignatius

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