Wonderful thoughts from the Pope on Hilary of Poitiers from today’s GA (Scroll down):

In 356, Hilary took part in the Synod of Beziers, in southern France, which he himself called ‘the synod of the false apostles’, since the synod was dominated by Arian bishops who denied the divinity of Jesus Christ.
These ‘false apostles’ asked Emperor Constantius to condemn the Bishop of Poitiers to exile. Thus, Hilary was forced to leave Gaul in the summer of 356.
Exiled to Phrygia in present-day Turkey, Hilary found himself in a religious context that was totally dominated by Arianism. But even there, his pastoral solicitude impelled him to work strenuously for the re-establishment of unity within the Church, on the basis of the correct faith formulated by the Council of Nicaea.
For this purpose, he started the draft of his most important and best-known dogmatic work, De Trinitate (On the Trinity). In it, Hilary discloses his own personal journey towards getting to know God and concerned himself with showing that the Scriptures clearly attest to the divinity of the Son and his equality with the Father – not only in the New Testament, but even in many pages of the Old Testament, in which the mystery of Christ is already foreshadowed.
Against the Arians, he insisted on the truth of the names Father and Son and developed all of his Trinitarian theology starting from the formula of Baptism given to us by the Lord himself: “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
The Father and the Son are of the same nature. And if any passages in the New Testament might be thought to indicate that the Son is inferior to the Father, Hilary offers precise rules for avoiding such misleading interpretations: Some Scriptural texts speak of Jesus as God while others highlight his humanity. Some refer to him in his pre-existence with the Father; others take into account the state of ‘abasement’ (kenosis), his descent to human state carried through to death; still others see him in the glory of his resurrection.
In the years of exile, Hilary also wrote the Book of Synods, in which he reproduces and comments for his brother bishops of Gaul the confessions of faith and other documents of the synods convened in the East in the mid-fourth century.
Always firm in his opposition to radical Arians, St. Hilary showed a conciliatory spirit towards those who agreed to profess that the Son resembled the Father in essence, hoping, of course, to lead them towards the full faith, which teaches that beyond mere resemblance, there is a true equality of divinity between the Father and the Son.
I find this characteristic of Hilary: the spirit of conciliation that seeks to comprehend even those who have not yet arrived and helping them with great theological intelligence, to reach full faith in the true divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ.