Biography
Dorus of Benevento
About Dorus of Benevento
Dorus was bishop of Benevento in the fifth century. A letter from Leo the Great, dated March 8, 448, preserves a difficult episode in his administration.
A priest named Paul had complained that a newly ordained colleague, Epicarpius, had been advanced ahead of senior priests. Leo rebuked Dorus for permitting this disruption of precedence. According to the letter, two senior priests had agreed to surrender their places, but Leo argued that their consent could not diminish the standing of other clergy.
Leo ordered those two priests placed last, while Paul and the others retained the rank determined by their ordination. He entrusted enforcement to Bishop Julius and warned Dorus against further complaints. The letter records the correction ordered, not Dorus’s response.
The archdiocese’s episcopal list remembers him under the Italian name Doro in 448. Francesco Lanzoni questioned an earlier Dorus in traditional lists, suggesting that the bishop known from Leo’s letter had been duplicated.
Nominis lists Dorus’s commemoration on November 20 but supplies no secure birth or death date.
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