St. Cyril of Jerusalem

Who they were

Cyril was bishop of Jerusalem in the raw decades after Constantine, when the holy city was filling with pilgrims and converts, and his surviving masterpiece is a course syllabus. The Catechetical Lectures were delivered in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself to the candidates of one Lent, walking them doctrine by doctrine toward Easter baptism, and they are followed by the Mystagogical Catecheses, which explain what the sacraments had just done to them only after they had received them. It is the direct ancestor of every programme that prepares adults for baptism today.

The rest of his episcopate was the era's storm. He was deposed and exiled three times in the Arian struggles, sold church treasures to feed the starving during a famine, which his enemies prosecuted him for, and lived to help complete the creed at Constantinople in 381. He is a Doctor of the Church, and his feast falls, fittingly, in Lent.

Why people turn to St. Cyril of Jerusalem

Catechumens and candidates preparing for baptism or reception, and the sponsors and teams walking with them. Converts in the middle of the walk, when the paperwork is long and the Easter that started it feels far off.

How to ask their intercession

For a catechumen by name through their Lent. And take his sequence as counsel: grace first, understanding after. Not everything has to be understood before it can be begun.