The life of St James the Confessor of Catania
That office placed him directly in the path of Constantine V, the emperor whose harsh campaign against the veneration of icons touched bishops across the empire, James among them. Pressed repeatedly to renounce the practice, he would not, and paid for that refusal with imprisonment, deliberate starvation, and repeated beatings, enduring all of it without giving way. He died still in exile, never returned to the see he had governed.
He is remembered among the many confessors of that same troubled century, one of numerous bishops who chose imprisonment and banishment over surrendering the honor owed to the holy images, his own witness folded into theirs in the Church's shared memory of that age.
