Nicene and Post-Nicene Church Fathers Series 2 - The Still Small ...

Troubles of the Closing Years.
made in the erection of a statue of the great archbishop of Cæsarea under the dome of the
Cathedral St. Paul in London. 301
301 Basil lived at the period when the relics of martyrs and saints were beginning to be collected and honoured.
(e.g. Ep. cxcvii.) To Damasus, the bishop of Rome, whose active sympathy he vainly strove to win, is mainly
due the reverent rearrangement of the Roman catacombs. (Roma Sotteranea, Northcote and Brownlow, p. 97.)
It was not to be expected that Basil’s own remains should be allowed to rest in peace; but the gap between the
burial at Cæsarea and the earliest record of their supposed reappearance is wide. There was a Church of St.
Basil at Bruges founded in 1187, which was believed to possess some of the archbishop’s bones. These were
solemnly translated in 1463 to the Church of St. Donatian, which disappeared at the time of the French revolution.
Pancirola (d. 1599) mentions a head, an arm, and a rib, said to be Basil’s, among the treasures of Rome.
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