Today, July 17, is the feast of:

Alexis of Rome (?) Suppressed in 1969 because he's fictitious, Alexis was popular in western Europe and remains popular in the East. The legend is that Alexis was of senatorial family. He fled from his wedding, became a beggar, and went on a long pilgrimage. His story splits there – one version says that he lived in poverty in Edessa, while another claims that he eventually returned – unrecognized - to live under the stairs of his own family home for seventeen years and was only recognised after his death.

Hyacinth (date uncertain) At Amastris, in Paphlagonia, the people adored an immense tree. This excited the wrath of a Christian, named Hyacinth, and one night he hewed down the sacred tree. He was discovered, arrested, and tortured. His teeth were knocked out, then sharp reeds were stuck into his flesh, and he was cast into prison, where he died of the injuries he had received.

Martyrs of Scili (d. 180) This is a group of seven men and five women tried and beheaded at Carthage under the emperor Commodus in the last year of Marcus Aurelius’ persecution. Their brief Acta, consisting almost entirely of an abstract of a hearing before a magistrate and sometimes incautiously characterized as a transcript, survive in various versions in Latin and Greek. It tells how the Roman proconsul tried to convince the Christians to denounce their beliefs, including a reprieve of thirty days to consider the matter. When charged with the unlawful practice of Christianity, they are supposed to have responded to the magistrate's words with "Deo gratias." Finally they were beheaded. Today is the date given in the Acta as that of the final hearing. A cult rose immediately after the six martyrs were beheaded; by the very next year the anniversary of their martyrdom was celebrated in Carthage. Today is also the day on which the sancti Scilitani are commemorated in the early sixth-century Calendar of Carthage. Their Acta is the first to mention a Latin Bible.

Justa and Rufina (d. later 2d century or early 3d century?) are virgin martyrs of Seville. According to their legendary Passio,  they were daughters of a maker of ceramics. During a festival they refused to sell items for use in pagan rituals. Enraged would-be clients trashed their stock in trade. When the image of the Syrian deity Salambo was carried past them, Justa and Rufina pulled down and destroyed this cult figure. They were promptly arrested, found guilty of sacrilege, and executed. In some early versions, Justa is male (Justus). The thirteenth-century Christian conqueror of Andalusia, Ferdinand III of Castile and Léon (d. 1252) erected a church to them in Seville over what was said to have been their place of execution. Their cult spread widely across Iberia in the later Middle Ages. They are the patron saints of Seville. Today is Their feast day in the Mozarabic rite. Ado, followed by Usuard, places it on July 19.

Marcellina (d. c398) was the older sister of Sts. Ambrose and Satyrus of Milan; we know about her from Ambrose's writings and from a late antique panegyric on her. After the death of her father she decided to live as a bride of Christ and in the early 350s took the veil from pope Liberius at St. Peter's on the Vatican. She seems to have spent most of the remainder of her life in Rome, making occasional visits to Milan. Ambrose dedicated his De virginibus to her. Marcellina was buried in the Basilica di Sant'Ambrogio in Milan. Her feast on this day is first recorded in an eleventh-century Ambrosian calendar. Her relics, rediscovered in Sant'Ambrogio's crypt in 1722, are now kept in the nave in an originally fifteenth-century chapel (rebuilt in the early nineteenth century) dedicated to her.

Ennodius (D. 521) Magnus Felix Ennodius was born in Arles to an important Gallo-Roman family. When his parents died, he was raised in Pavia. After his education he married, and became a rhetoric professor at Milan until converted during a serious illness. He and his wife both embraced the religious life. He became a deacon in 493, bishop of Pavia (or Ticinum) in c514, served on diplomatic missions for Pope Honorius. Twice he was sent to Constantinople to try to mediate the end of a schism between the Roman and Constantinopolitan churches, but without success. He helped the poor, built churches, and was an important author of literary and ecclesiastical texts. His metrical epitaph survives in that city's Basilica di San Michele. Some of his hymns are still in use today.

Marina, virgin (about 8th century) There was a father once, left a widower with a little daughter;  and in his desolation he resolved to renounce the world and retire into a monastery.  So he committed the little child to a relation, and became a monk.  But after a while the father, whose name was Eugenius, went to his kinsman and reclaimed his child, and he cut her hair, and put her in boy's clothes, and changed her name from Marina to Marinus, and brought her back to the monastery, where she lived for the rest of her life as a monk. But when Marinus was prepared for burial, it was found that she was a woman.

Kenelm / Cynhelm (9th century) was a Mercian prince. Historically speaking, charters tell that he owned Glastonbury, and he died in 812 (or perhaps 821), possibly in battle. Legend made him more interesting, telling that he succeeded his father as king of Mercia at the age of seven. His tutor murdered the child king after only a few months, though, at the urging of his jealous sister. Better yet, his tomb was discovered thanks to a document (written in Old English) that was dropped by a dove onto the high altar of St. Peter's in Rome. Perhaps oddest of all, the evil sister received divine punishment: while reciting a psalm backwards, her eyes fell out. Kenelm was venerated as a martyr.

Leo IV, pope (d. 855) A native of Rome whose father bore a Lombard name, Leo was a Benedictine monk, elected pope in 847 without prior imperial approval and without imperial opposition. He did much to restore the church's treasure after the Muslim sack of the Eternal City in 846 as well as to prepare for future assaults by fortifying the Vatican borgo (the Leonine Wall is named for him) and by securing promises of aid from the maritime states of Amalfi, Naples, and Gaeta. In 849 the latter's combined naval squadrons together with vessels from the papal ports, all previously blessed by Leo and operating under the command of Caesarius the brother of St. Athanasius of Naples, were victorious over a flotilla of Muslim raiders off Ostia. Leo was an active administrator of the church both in Italy and abroad. He was buried in St. Peter's. Leo is famously depicted in the Vatican's Stanze di Rafaele both at the scene of this battle and suppressing by means of a benediction a fire that had broken out in the borgo (both paintings by assistants of Raphael, 1514-17). Leo's feast has now been suppressed.

Clement of Okhrida and companions (d. 916) Clement was the first Slav to become a bishop, in Bulgaria in the reign of Khan Simeon. Clement founded the monastery of Okhrida (near Velitsa, Bulgaria), which became his primatial see. Beside his missionary work, he wrote a book about St. Cyril, and is considered to be the creator of the "cyrilliic" scripture, still in use in SE Europe. He was a very successful missionary, and is regarded as one of the five apostles of Bulgaria and Macedonia (all commemorated today). They are Clement, Nahum, Gorazd, Angelarius, and Sabas. They were all priests who helped Cyri and Methodius as missionaries to the Slavs. They were expelled when the mission was suppressed in 885 (in favor of the Latin rite) and went on to Bulgaria, which was just converting to Christianity. Clement became the first archbishop of the Bulgarian church, and first author of original texts in Church Slavonic.

Andrew Zoerard (d. c1010) was a Polish hermit, associated with a Benedictine monastery near Nitra, Slovakia. He was canonized in 1083.

Nerses Lampronazi (d. 1198) Nerses was the son of a Cilician prince. He became a major scholar, theologian, and exegete. He was ordained in 1169, spent time as a hermit, and became archbishop of Tarsus in 1176. His greatest work was an attempt to draw the Armenian church from its isolation, and before his death the bishops of Armenia west of the Euphrates entered communion with the Roman church. Nerses also translated the Benedictine Rule and Gregory's Dialogues into Armenian.

Ceslaus (d. 1242) was a canon at Cracow, then became a Dominican along with (St.) Hyacinth, his brother. Ceslaus served as provincial of Poland, and preached in Silesia and Bohemia. He helped lead Breslau's resistance to the Mongols in 1240.

Jadwiga (Hedwig) of Poland / of Anjou, her dynastic name, (d. 1399) was the youngest daughter of Louis I of Hungary and of his wife, Elizabeth of Poland, sister of the king of Poland, Casimir III the Great. Jadwiga was a princess of both Hungary and Poland, and was betrothed at one year old to the heir of the duchy of Austria and raised at the Habsburg court. But her father died when she was eight, and she was named his heir; after much diplomatic intrigue, her sister became queen of Hungary and Jadwiga became queen of the Poles. Her betrothal was cancelled. (Her elder sister Mary was unacceptable to the Polish nobles because of her marriage to Sigismund of Luxemburg.) In 1385 Jadwiga was married to the Lithuanian grand duke Jogaila, who accepted Christianity and became king of Poland under the name Władysław.  Queen Jadwiga was very pious, sponsored important cultural institutions (including the academy in Kraków that became today's Jagiellonian University). She died at the age of 25, after giving birth to a premature daughter. Her cult spread rapidly and a canonization process began in 1426. She was only beatified in 1986, though, and canonized in 1997.

Happy reading,

Terri Morgan

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Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit; Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad. - Anon