During the reign of Valerian or Diocletian, St. Arcadius was condemned to death by cutting off his limbs joint by joint. Arcadius, with a joyful countenance, surveying his scattered limbs all around him, and offering them to God said, “Happy members, now dear to me, as you at last truly belong to God, being all…
Epiphany, the manifestation of the Lord: guided by this thought the East has made the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist the central theme of its feast on January 6, the voice of the Father, the descent of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, the testimony of John, all constituting the…
Bishop of Poitiers in the fourth century, St. Hilary was one of the great champions of Catholic belief in the divinity of Christ. By his preaching, his treatise on the Trinity, his part in the Councils, his daring opposition to the Emperor Constantius, he showed himself a courageous apostle of the truth. He could not…
It was from St. Jerome (420) that the west learnt of the life of St. Paul; the book which he devoted to the life of the first Christian hermit charmed and instructed generations of the faithful and formed the inspiration of many artists. St. Paul is said to have died in 341, in a hermitage…
Just at the time when Diocletian had spent his first violence against the Church, St. Marcellus was elected Pope (308). He reorganized the Catholic hierarchy disrupted by the persecution. His epitaph, composed by St. Damasus tells us that by enforcing the canons of holy penance, he drew upon himself the contradictions and persecutions of many…
A few days after St. Paul, the first hermit, the Church today celebrates the feast of St. Antony, the father of monks. Antony retired to the desert at about the age of eighteen in order to live in perfect solitude. The devil, for the purpose of making him give up his solitary life, appeared to…
St. Prisca was a noble Roman lady, and after many torments finished her triumph by the sword, about the year 275. She is venerated at Rome in a church of the same name on Mount Aventine. The tradition at Rome is that St. Peter consecrated an altar, and baptized there in an urn of stone…
Marius a nobleman of Persia with his wife Martha and two sons Audifax and Abachum being converted to the faith, distributed his fortune among the poor as the primitive Christians did at Jerusalem and came to Rome to visit the tombs of the apostles in the year 270. The emperor Aurelian then persecuted the church,…
Marius a nobleman of Persia with his wife Martha and two sons Audifax and Abachum being converted to the faith, distributed his fortune among the poor as the primitive Christians did at Jerusalem and came to Rome to visit the tombs of the apostles in the year 270. The emperor Aurelian then persecuted the church,…
Together with St. Cecilia, St. Agnes is one of the most famous Roman martyrs. At the height of persecution when many of the faithful, and even the clergy, were giving up the faith, she remained faithful to Christ and made the sacrifice of her youthful life. St. Ambrose and St. Damasus praised the example that…
