| SS. MARCELLINUS AND PETER, MM. |
| Feast: June 2
|
| Marcellinus
was a priest, and Peter an exorcist, both of the clergy of Rome, and eminent for
their zeal and piety. In the persecution of Dioclesian, about the year 304, they
were condemned to die for their faith: and by a secret order of the judge, the
executioner led them into a forest, that the holy men being executed privately,
no Christians might be acquainted with the place of their sepulchre. When he had
brought them into a thicket overgrown with thorns and briers, three; miles from
Rome, he declared to them his sanguinary commission. The saints cheerfully fell
to work themselves, grubbed up the brambles, and cleared a spot fit for their
sepulchre. After they were beheaded, their bodies were buried in the same place.
Some time after, Lucilla, a pious lady, being informed by revelation, and
assisted by another devout lady named Firmina, took up their bodies and
honorably interred them near that of St. Tiburtius on the Lavican road in the
Catacombs. Pope Damasus assures us, that, when a child, he learned all these
particulars from the mouth of the executioner himself, and he has inserted them
in a Latin epitaph with which he adorned their tomb. Anastasius the librarian
testifies from ancient registers, that Constantine the Great built here a church
in honor of these martyrs, in which he caused his mother St. Helena to be buried
under a porphyry tomb, on the Lavican road, three miles from Rome, and that he
gave to this church a paten, weighing thirty-five pounds, of pure gold, with
many other rich presents; which is also mentioned by Bede,1 Ado,2 and Sigebert.3
The porphyry mausoleum of St. Helena is still shown among other antiquities near
the Lateran basilica. Honorius I. and Adrian I. repaired this church and
cemetery of St. Tiburtius, and SS. Marcellinus and Peter, as Anastasius
mentions. Not long after, the bodies of SS. Marcellinus and Peter were
translated into Germany on the following occasion. Eginhard, a German, the
favorite secretary of Charlemagne, and his wife Emma, by mutual consent, made a
vow of perpetual continency; and becoming a monk, was chosen abbot of Fontenelle,
and, in 819, abbot of Ghent. Emma died in 836, to his great affliction, as
appears from the letters of Lupus, abbot of Ferrieres, to him. This great man,
in 827, sent his secretary to Rome, to procure from pope Gregory IV. some relies
of martyrs to enrich the monasteries which he had founded or repaired. The pope
sent him the bodies of SS. Marcellinus and Peter, which Eginhard translated to
Strasburg. But soon after he deposited them first at Michlenstad; and afterwards
at Malinheim, since called Selgenstad, three leagues from Frankfort, and two
from Achaffenburg; where, in 829, he built to their honor a church and
monastery, of which he died the first abbot. Besides the life of Charlemagne,
and the annals of France, during the reigns of Pepin, Charlemagne, and Louis
Debonnaire, he wrote four books in prose, and one in verse, on the translation
of SS. Marcellinus and Peter. This translation is also mentioned by Sigebert,
Aymoinus, Rabanus Maurus, &c. Pope Gregory the Great preached his twenty
homilies on the gospels in the church of SS. Marcellinus and Peter at Rome; as
appears from some of them, and from the testimony of John the Deacon.4 See their
acts and the history of their translation in Papebroke, t. 1, Junij, p. 170, and
Laderchius, Diss. de Basilicis, SS. Marcellini and Petri; Romae, 1705
Endnotes 1 Beda, l. de temporibus. 2 Ado in martyrol. 3 Chron. ad an 849. (Taken from Vol. 6 of "The Lives or the Fathers, Martyrs and Other Principal Saints" by the Rev. Alban Butler, the 1864 edition published by D. & J. Sadlier, & Company) |
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