Today, September 15, is the feast of:

Nicomedes of Rome (d. c90?) According to the Roman Martyrology, Nicomedes was a disciple of St. Peter and worked as a priest in Rome.  After St. Felicula was martyred, he took her body from the sewer in which it had been thrown and buried it. He himself was arrested, refused to foreswear Christianity or sacrifice to the state Gods, and was flogged to death. His veneration in Rome goes back to an early date. He is a poorly documented but much venerated martyr, absent from the Depositio Martyrum of 354 and from codices of the early family of the (ps-)HM. Our earliest testimony of him, a Passio thought to be originally of the fifth or sixth century, is not a separate piece of writing but rather a segment of the much larger Passio of Nereus and Achilleus. The latter provides highly fictional stories for a number of saints some of whom we know to have been real because their burial places are archeologically attested. While there is always the possibility that Nicomedes is a complete fiction, it does seem probable that when in this account (which makes him a priest martyred under Domitian) he is said to have been buried on the Via Nomentana outside the city that much at least is accurate and that at the time of its writing he had a memoria of some sort in that vicinity. Boniface V (619-25) erected here a basilica in his honor that is a fixture in the seventh-century pilgrim itineraries for Rome and that was restored by Adrian I (772-95). A feast on June 1 for the dedication of this church occurs in the Gelasian and the Gregorian sacramentaries, in the historical martyrologies, in the expanded version of the (ps.-)HM, and in the epitomes of the latter. All of these also list Nicomedes for today. A later Passio, thought to be no earlier than the seventh century, gives June 1 as his dies natalis and makes him a martyr under Maximian.

   Nicomedes’ relics are said to repose in Rome's church of Santa Prassede. But all in Parma know that in 876 bishop Wibod brought them to Salsomaggiore Terme in Emilia, where they were used for the dedication of a new church in Nicomedes’ honor.

   Nicomedes as depicted in a (c1370) Roman Missal of north Italian origin (Avignon, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 136, fol. 270v):

http://tinyurl.com/247b2d7 , http://tinyurl.com/2eqx9wr

   Nicomedes as depicted in a (c1414) breviary for the Use of Paris (Châteauroux, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 2, fol. 333v): http://tinyurl.com/2e76bnf

   Nicomedes is second from the left in Benedetto Bembo's Polyptych of Torchiara (1462) formerly in the oratorio di San Nicomede in the castle of Torrechiara at Langhirano-Torrechiara and now in Milan's Castello Sforzesco: http://tinyurl.com/fbfs2

Valerian of Tournus (d. c178, supposedly) is the saint of a former monastery at Tournus (Saône-et-Loire) whose earliest church was already in existence in the sixth century when Gregory of Tours referred to it as a sanctuary. He has a very brief legendary Passio that seems to underlie his elogium in Usuard's Martyrology and whose earliest witness is dated to the late ninth century.

   This account, which places Valerian's suffering in the persecution under Marcus Aurelius, has Sts. Marcellus of Chalon and Valerian released from prison in Lyon by an angel and then go their separate ways. After he has reported Marcellus' execution at Chalons the provincial governor in Lyons hears from pagans that Valerian has been living at a secret little cell near Tournus and has been making many converts. Valerian is immediately arrested, declares his faith to the governor, refuses to sacrifice to the idols, and is first tortured and then executed by decapitation. His association with Marcellus, which in Gregory of Tours is expressed only in terms of the proximity of their shrines, has as described here the effect of asserting his monastery's equal antiquity with the one dedicated to Marcellus at relatively nearby Chalon-sur-Saône (and said by Fredegar to have been founded by the Burgundian king [St.] Guntram in 584).

   Valerian's monastery quickly fell into the shadow of Tournus' abbey of St. Philibert, established c950. Its small church was replaced in the eleventh or early twelfth century by the present deconsecrated église St.-Valérien, which survived as one of the town's churches.

   Valerian's martyrdom as depicted in a (1463) copy of Vincent of Beauvais' Speculum historiale in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 50, fol. 391r): http://tinyurl.com/3acnaxk

Nicetas the Goth /the Great (d. in the 370s) is first recorded in a seemingly late fifth-century Greek-language Passio written for his cult at the Cilician city of Mopsuestia (later Mamistra and now Yakapınar in Turkey's Adana province). According to this account, he was a member of the Christian minority among the still mostly pagan Goths settled in Dacia. Nicetas was converted by the Arian missionary Ulfilas. Ordained priest while still young, he fell victim to anti-Christian persecution under king Athanaric and was executed by burning. Aided by a miracle, his loving friend Marinus obtained his body, brought it to Mopsuestia, and on a September 15th laid it to rest in a martyrion there. A metaphrastic Passio adds to and otherwise alters this story in various ways.

   Byzantine synaxary accounts attest to the existence of a church in Constantinople dedicated to Nicetas and believed by some to hold his relics. The Visoki Dečani monastery (near Peć in, depending on one's view of the matter, either the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija) has what is said to be Nicetas' left hand, the rest of his relics were taken to Mopsuestia in Cilicia (hence the cult's presence throughout Byzantine and Syrian churches). In Serbian art, he is depicted as a military saint.

   The Visoki Dečani monastery (near Peć) has what is said to be his left hand: http://www.kosovo.net/st013_y.jpg

   Nicetas as depicted in a fresco (betw. 1263 and 1270) in the nave of the monastery church of the Holy Trinity at Sopoćani in, depending on one's view of the matter, Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija or the Republic of Kosovo: http://tinyurl.com/2ajcjoo ,  http://tinyurl.com/2b9qr2y

   Nicetas as depicted in a fresco (c1300), attributed to Manuel Panselinos, in the Protaton church at Karyes on Mount Athos:

      http://tinyurl.com/37w3fhy , http://tinyurl.com/35vq3hp

   Nicetas as depicted in the September calendar portraits among the frescoes (betw. c1312 and 1321/1322) of the nave of the monastery church of the Theotokos at Gračanica in, depending on one's view of the matter, either Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija or the Republic of Kosovo: http://tinyurl.com/ylepy54 , http://tinyurl.com/yfc8t6x

   Nicetas (in the first view, at center; at right, St. Stephen protomartyr) as depicted in the frescoes (c1314-c1320) of the originally early fourteenth-century monastery church dedicated to him at Čučer in today's Čučer-Sandevo in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia:

      http://tinyurl.com/2apcg76 , http://users.stlcc.edu/mfuller/macedonia2006/StNikita22.JPG

   Nicetas' martyrdom as depicted in a September calendar scene in the frescoes (betw. 1335 and 1350) of the narthex in the church of the Holy Ascension at the Visoki Dečani monastery near Peć: http://tinyurl.com/yadduh6

   Nicetas (at right) as depicted in a fresco (1407-1408) in the church of the Manasija (Resava) monastery near Despotovac (Pomoravlje dist.) in Serbia: http://tinyurl.com/2u79phk

   Nicetas as depicted in a fresco (1502) by Dionisy and sons in the Virgin Nativity cathedral of the St. Ferapont Belozero (Ferapontov Belozersky) monastery at Ferapontovo in Russia's Vologda oblast: http://www.dionisy.com/eng/museum/112/294/index.shtml

John Kolobos (5th century) is one of the most entertaining of the desert fathers, famed for his gentleness and humility, as well as for his absent-mindedness, and the obedience that made him diligently water his master's staff for three years when ordered to do so (it finally sprouted).

Oranna (6th century?)  According to legend, Oranna was the daughter of a Scottish king, sent away from her father because of her deafness.  Along with Wendelin, she is supposed to have come to the Saar-Moselle region, where she evangelized the region along with a female companion named Cyrilla. Both women were buried in Eschweiler. In 1488 Oranna's relics were raised. She is a patron saint of those suffering ear problems.

Aper/Aprus/in French, Epvre or Èvre of Toul (d. early 6th century) is the traditional seventh bishop of Toul and the second after the historically better attested Auspicius (fl. c470). He is also the saint of Toul's now vanished abbey that was already named for him in 626/27 and in whose church he received an Elevatio in 978. Aper has a Vita now often ascribed to Adso of Montier-en-Der, who in 935 was scholasticus at the abbey of St.-Èvre; its earliest witnesses are of the eleventh century. This makes him a native of the territory of Troyes and a paragon of charity and of interest in the life of the church from childhood who became a model bishop, who operated miracles, and who founded a basilica that from its location is clearly meant to be the church of the abbey. Aper also has a separate postmortem Miracula of the later tenth century.

   In the tenth century it was believed that a local saint of Troyes, Apronia, was Aper's sister. Toul's bishop St. Gerard I, who was also responsible for Aper's Elevatio, bought her relics from the bishop of Troyes and deposited them not in the abbey but in his newly founded church of St. Gengulph (whose relics Gerard had bought from the bishop of Langres). Aper's traditional year of death is 507. His cult seems always to have been restricted to Lotharingia, where it is attested by numerous dedications, and to adjacent Champagne.

Leobin (d. 556) was from a peasant family near Poitiers. He became a hermit, then a priest, then abbot of Brou, and ended up as bishop of Chartres.

Aichardus/Achard of Jumieges (d. 687) was a Frank (Merovingian) who was educated at Poitiers and became a monk at Asion over his father's objections. Eventually he became prior of the newly-founded monastery at Quincay, and then succeeded St. Philibert as abbot of Jumieges. He is supposed to have had over 1,000 monks at Jumieges. Like his predecessor, he had gift of foretelling deaths (including his own).

Mirin/Merinus/Meadhran (7th century) was a disciple of St. Comgall and became abbot of Bangor (Co. Down, Ireland). He went as a missionary to Scotland and founded the monastery of Paisley. When an Irish king opposed him, Mirin laid the pains of childbirth upon him. His tomb at Paisley was a pilgrimage center.

Notburga of Hochhausen (7th century) is supposed to have been a hermitess who lived in a cave in Hochhausen in the seventh century; a doe is supposed to have brought her food every day.

Emilas and Jeremias (d. 852) Two of the more overt martyrs of Cordoba, they were brothers who actively went around preaching against Islam in Arabic. Emilas was a deacon.

Ludmilla of Bohemia (d. 921) was born in c860. She married the Bohemian duke Borivoj I. Both were baptized by St. Methodius and worked to spread Christianity in the duchy. Ludmilla raised her grandson Wenceslas as a Christian, which won the enmity of her non-Christian daughter-in-law Drahomira. After Ludmilla was widowed, Drahomira forced her to retire from court and then arranged the older woman's murder by strangulation.

Walter of Pontoise (d. 1095 or 1099) was a well educated, ascetically inclined Picard who gave up being regent master of a school with aristocratic patrons to enter religion at the abbey of Rebais-en-Brie in Champagne.  While he was there he fed a famished prisoner in the abbot's jail and then released the man upon his undertaking to do no further injury to the church and not to seek revenge for his ill treatment. Walter then informed the abbot of what he had done, expecting a tongue-lashing followed by a physical beating and receiving both in ample measure. We are not told with what feelings the abbot later greeted the news that his distinguished and troublesome monk had just been named by the young king Philip I to head an abbey being founded at today's Pontoise (Val-d'Oise), on the opposite side of Paris from Brie.

   According to at least his first two Vitae (BHL 8798; its expansion, BHL 8796), Walter was in almost every respect a model abbot. But the stresses of the position caused him twice to flee his burden, the first time becoming a monk at Cluny and the second time an hermit on an island in the Loire near Tours.  On both occasions Walter was quickly discovered and made to return.  A subsequent petition to pope St. Gregory VII for permission to resign was denied.  From Gregory's point of view, presumably, Walter could do more good as a reforming abbot in the Île de France, where he opposed simony and nicolaism and was given to speaking forthrightly to king and to bishops.

   Walter was laid to rest in the abbey church of Saint-Martin, at that time still under construction.  Miracles were reported at his tomb and a collection of these (BHL 8797) seems to have been drawn up after 1114 but before his canonization in 1153.  The latter was performed by the archbishop of Rouen in the presence of the bishops of Paris and of Senlis as well as of emissaries from the archbishop of Reims.  Both the abbey of Saint-Martin and its church have disappeared.  Walter, said to be still resting in his twelfth-/thirteenth-century tomb, now reposes in the église Notre-Dame at Pontoise, a late sixteenth-century successor to a thirteenth-century church located in what originally was a faubourg.  Here's a view of the tomb: http://tinyurl.com/2shgtj

   At his canonization Walter's feast was fixed for the day following that of the Discovery of the Holy Cross (thus September 15).  March 23, on the reckoning followed by the "new" RM, is W.'s dies natalis.  Another candidate for that is April 8.

Jordan of Pulsano (Blessed) (d. 1145). In 1139 he succeeded St. John of Matera both as abbot of the latter's relatively recently founded abbey at Pulsano and as general of the nascent Pulsanese Benedictine congregation. The sainted founder's later 12th-century Vita, thought to have been written by Jordan's immediate successor, Bl. Joel (d. 1177), describes Jordan as a good and just man, considerate both to God and to men, who governed strenue, juste, pie, atque fideliter. This Vita also calls Jordan “beatus” and associates him with the founder in the miraculous extrication of a wayward brother who while riding ahead of their party had fallen with his horse into a crevasse corresponding physically to the spiritual pit into which he had already sunk (the words used are terrae vorago and fovea).

   Jordan's entry in the dismembered thirteenth-century Pulsanese lectionary and martyrology preserved in the BAV and elsewhere (the martyrology in is the BN at Naples) says that he came from a prominent family of Monteverde in Campania, that he had been schooled at Benevento, where he lived with an uncle who mistreated him, and that, barely recovered from a serious illness, he had fled into a wood where John of Matera, then on his way from Capua to Apulia, discovered him and took him on as an acolyte. During his brief generalship Jordan both expanded his congregation's holdings in Apulia and increased its north Italian presence through the founding, at the behest of the bishop of Piacenza, of the monastery of Santa Maria di Quartazzola in Gossolengo in Emilia. Today is his dies natalis. His cult was immediate, though recognition of him as a saint seems to have been limited to the Pulsanese Benedictine congregation and (perhaps) to the former diocese of his native Monteverde, where he is also commemorated today.

Aichardus/Achard, monk (c. 1170) recorded in Cistercian menology; master of novices at Clairvaux.

Adam of Caithness (d. 1222) Not formally canonized. Adam was a Cistercian monk who became abbot of Melrose (Scotland). King William of Scotland appointed him as bishop of Caithness in 1213, where he proved to be extremely unpopular, especially since he did his best to collect all the tithes owing to the church, against traditional practice. After increasing the customary offering of a span of butter (whatever a "span" is) per twenty cows to one for every ten cows, the people finally had enough. They revolted, broke into the bishop's house, and burned Adam and his followers to death. But Adam's body came intact out of the fire, and an unofficial cult sprang up thanks to that miracle.

Orlando/Roland de'Medici (d. 1386) Not formally canonized. This member of the Florentine Medici family became a hermit in the forest of Salsomaggiore (near Parma), where he spent 25 years in penitence and complete silence. Many miracles were reported at his tomb. He was beatified in 1852. He is a patron saint for those suffering headaches.

Catherine of Genoa (d. 1510) was born in 1447 in Genoa, to the noble family of Fieschi. She was married at sixteen, at first unhappily, to the son of the Adorno family, political and mercantile rivals of the Fieschi. At about the age of twenty-five Catherine underwent the first of a henceforth lifelong series of mystical experiences, began to engage in frequent prayer, and started taking the Eucharist almost daily. She also served as a lay attendant at a local hospital that ultimately she came to manage. Shortly afterwards her husband went bankrupt, which he saw as a sign from God  - and from then on lived a deeply religious life, becoming (with Catherine) a Franciscan tertiary and living chastely with her. Catherine dedicated herself from then on to the care of the sick in the Pammatone hospital in Genoa, which she also led from 1490 on. Her dedication, especially during two epidemics of plague, led people to honor her as a saint. After Catherine's husband died in 1497, she began to commit her mystical experiences to writing, writing a treatise on Purgatory and a dialogue of the soul and the body. Catherine's Life (with an account of her mystical experiences provided by her last confessor) and edited writings were published posthumously in 1551. She was canonized by Pope Benedict XIV in 1737.

Jan van Woerden (de Bakker) (d. 1525) A Protestant martyr. Jan was born in 1499 in Woerden (near Utrecht). He became a priest in 1522, but his sermons were so favorable to Luther's teachings that he was imprisoned. A popular rising broke Jan from prison and he fled to Germany, but soon returned. Sentenced to a penitential pilgrimage to Rome, he never went, and soon denounced his priesthood, married, and worked as a baker (thus his alternative name of "de Bakker"). Arrested again, Jan was soon tried as a heretic, hanged, and his body burned.

Our Lady of Sorrows - made popular by Servite friars from their inception, but was not made a feast throughout the Western church until 1814.

Happy reading,

Terri Morgan

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“The nice thing about studying history is that you can always find people who are a lot weirder than you are.” – Delia Sherman