Artigo do dia · 2 de June
Saints Marcellinus and Peter
At Rome, along the Via Labicana, is the memorial of Saints Marcellinus, a priest, and Peter, an exorcist, who during the persecution of Diocletian sealed with their blood the faith they preached. Cast into prison, they did not silence the Gospel but converted their jailer and his household; beheaded in a desolate place so that no one could venerate them, they saw their tomb become, by the grace of God, one of the most beloved shrines of the Church of Rome.
Roman Martyrology
About the saint
Zeal for souls is one of the most admirable forces that grace kindles in a Christian’s heart — and Saints Marcellinus and Peter carried it right into a prison cell, in chains and awaiting death. Where most of us would see only the end, these two Romans saw a mission field: they preached, and the jailer himself surrendered to Christ. Let us come to know the story of these two extraordinary martyrs and see how, in them, the love of God proved stronger than the chains, the broken glass, and the sword.
Life
The life of Marcellinus and Peter before their martyrdom has reached us in very fragmentary form. The earliest account is that of Saint Pope Damasus I, who said he had heard it from the executioner himself; details such as the conversion of the jailer come from a later passio, from the sixth century. Here we present what the tradition of the Church has preserved.
The earliest sources tell us little about the childhood and youth of Marcellinus and Peter; what we know for certain is that they lived in Rome at the beginning of the fourth century, when the persecution launched by the emperor Diocletian was falling with fury upon the Church. Marcellinus was an esteemed priest of the city, and Peter exercised the ministry of an exorcist — the one who, in the name of Christ, confronted the power of the devil over the possessed. They were, then, two men wholly given to the service of God and of the Christian people.
Arrested for their faith, they were thrown into prison. But the bars did not silence the Gospel. So great was the zeal of the two that, right there in the prison, they converted the jailer, Artemius, and his entire family. The witness of someone who is in chains and yet still radiates peace and steadfastness carries a power that no speech possesses — and it was this power that touched the heart of the man charged with guarding them.
Condemned by the magistrate Severus, they suffered atrocious tortures: tradition relates that Marcellinus was laid upon shards of broken glass and Peter was choked with tightened ropes. So that no Christian could honor their tombs, the judges chose a wasteland covered with thorns and brambles, about three miles from Rome, as the place of execution. It is said that the two martyrs, far from drawing back, joyfully cleared the very glade where they would be killed. There they were beheaded and secretly buried, around the year 304.
The secret, however, did not hold. The executioner himself, shaken by what he had seen, became a Christian and revealed the place. Two devout women, Lucilla and Firmina — according to tradition, warned by a divine revelation — found the bodies and gave them a worthy burial, beside the tomb of Saint Tiburtius, on the Via Labicana. There was born what would become the famous Catacomb of Marcellinus and Peter.
What the persecutors meant to hide, God willed to glorify. Saint Pope Damasus I, who claimed to have heard the story from the lips of the former executioner, had the tomb opened and adorned and composed the martyrs’ epitaph in Latin. Their names entered the Roman Canon of the Mass, and the emperor Constantine raised a basilica in their honor. Centuries later, in 1253, Pope Alexander IV translated the relics to the Roman church that bears the names of the two to this day — a sign of a veneration that, far from dying in that wasteland of thorns, has endured through the centuries.
Why we celebrate today
The Church celebrates Marcellinus and Peter on June 2, the day on which the very ancient Hieronymian Martyrology already recorded the memorial of the two martyrs and the location of their tomb on the Via Labicana. It is the date of their dies natalis — their birth into Heaven — preserved in the Roman liturgy since the earliest centuries. Today the Church keeps it as an optional memorial.
For our life
I think we have much to learn from Marcellinus and Peter, who are a light for our own journey. We tend to believe we can only bear witness to Christ when everything is going well — with health, with time, with peace. They show us the opposite: it was in chains, with nothing in their hands, that they converted their own jailer. This challenges us: we too, in the situations that seem only to bind and confine us — an illness, a heavy job, a cross we did not choose — can radiate the faith through the patience and the peace that come from God, because very often the person beside us is converted more by the way we carry our burden than by anything we say. May we ask these martyrs for a little of the zeal they had for souls. And let us thank God for letting us come to know their story, so that we may take one more step along the path of our faith.
Amen, amen I say to you, unless the grain of wheat falling into the ground die,
Jo 12:24 (Douay-Rheims)
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