Letter 1016: Your Apostolic Authority exercises the primacy granted by God and demonstrates that the preeminent position you hold...

Bishop Avitus to the pope [patriarch] of Jerusalem. Your apostolate exercises the primacy granted by the Divinity, and that it holds the foremost place in the universal church of God it strives to show not by privileges alone, but by merits. Your episcopal seat adorns our religion alike, the seat together with the person. Hence, bound to your worthiness by the debt owed to your bountifulness, through him I discharge my vows of thanks, through whom gifts have come to me that are to be valued not by the prices of their quantity, but by the rewards of salvation. For you have enriched the poverty of the farthest world with the riches of sanctification, and you have touched the obscurity of the western sun, sharing with us the light of your radiant rising. The brightness of your gift has wiped from our provinces the rust of a sluggish religion, which by the watering of an overflowing good has rewarded our faith with contemplation, since, the inmost chambers of the heavenly treasures having been laid open in your age, we have looked upon whatever we as catholics are commanded to believe. Pray, for what remains, that you may have sent such things to the worthy: commend us to those mysteries which you judged should be entrusted to us. By these let our devotion be built up, let our land be defended, so that, by the saving pledge granted to us, you may render those whom you did not deem unworthy of fellowship with the earthly Jerusalem fit for the dwelling-place of the Jerusalem above and heavenly.

Avitus episcopus papae Hierosolymitano. Exercet apostolatus vester concessos a divinitate primatus et quod principem locum in universali ecclesia dei teneat, non privilegiis solum studet monstrare, sed meritis. Ornat pariter legem nostram cathedra vestra, cathedra cum persona. Vnde obligatus dignationi vestrae debito largitatis per ipsum dependo gratiarum vota, per quem ad me munera pervenerunt non quantitatis pretiis, sed salutis praemiis aesti- manda. Ditastis namque sanctificationis opibus pauperiem orbis extremi et obscuritatem solis occidui participato nobiscum fulgidi ortus lumine contigistis. Tersit a provinciis nostris torpentis religionis rubiginem claritas doni, quae boni supercurrentis irriguo fidem nostram contemplatione munerata est, cum patefactis in aetate vestra penetra- libus caelestium thesaurorum quicquid catholici credere iubemur, inspeximus. Orate, quod superest, ut dignis talia miseritis: commendate nos mysteriis, quae nobis com- mittenda duxistis. Aedificetur his devotio nostra, regio defendatur, ut indulto nobis pignore salutari, quos terrestris Hierosolymae consortio non censuistis indignos, super- nae ac caelestis habitaculo reddatis idoneos.