medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (17. October) is the feast day of:
1) Catervus (late 1st or early 2d cent., supposedly). The patron saint of Tolentino (MC) in the Marche, C. had a cult that was already in existence in 1054, when church dedicated to him is recorded as having existed there. In 1206 a local monastery of the same name is attested. By 1254 C. was being called a martyr. Though Boniface VIII in an indulgence of 1299 referred to him as _confessor_, locally C. was still held to be a martyr in 1474, when he is first recorded as Tolentino's patron saint.
A later medieval Vita (BHL 1656 b and c; 13th-cent.?) makes C. the son of noble parents who heard Peter and Paul preach at Rome; according to this account, C. exercised the office of praetorian prefect and was married early to a highly placed Roman named Septimia Severina, with whom he lived in chaste wedlock. He preached, performed miracles, and converted many in Rome, in the Holy Land, and finally at Tolentino in the March of Ancona, where he was martyred for his faith. Septimia Severina saw angels carrying C.'s soul off to heaven; his mortal remains she placed in a sculpted marble tomb that the Vita describes in some detail.
That description, though in places inaccurate, is hardly fanciful. For the sarcophagus exists (it has a place of honor in Tolentino's cathedral of San Catervo) and its inscriptions, misread and/or misinterpreted in the Middle Ages, together with its Christian iconography clearly formed the basis for C.'s cult. This was the resting place of the late fourth-century former praetorian prefect Flavius Iulius Catervius, of his wife Septimia Severina, and of their son Bassus. Septimia Severina had it made for her husband and, ultimately, for herself: the two are shown on it together in marital union:
http://tolentinonline.com/images/MONUMENTI/cate4_b.jpg
An Adoration of the Magi from the same sarcophagus:
http://tinyurl.com/8ybtd
A distance view of the sarcophagus in the cathedral's Cappella di San
Catervo:
http://tolentinonline.com/images/MONUMENTI/cate3_b.jpg
There is not the slightest evidence, by modern standards, that any of the occupants was particularly saintly.
According to an inscription on the sarcophagus, Catervius died on 17. October of some year; hence Catervus' feast day. Septimia Severina was celebrated liturgically at Tolentino on 27. November (the Vita makes it clear that both husband and wife were saints). An inspection of the sarcophagus in 1567 yielded remains of Bassus as well; he came to be celebrated on 25 October. None of these worthies has ever graced the pages of the RM. C. continues to be celebrated liturgically at Tolentino on this day.
The sarcophagus is shown and discussed in Josef Wilpert, _I sarcofagi cristiani antichi_ (Roma: Pontificio istituto di archeologia cristiana, 1929-36), vol. 1, pp. 7, 90-91 and plates 72, 73, and 94. Its inscriptions are at _CIL_, IX. 5566; they are given again in the preface to Hippolyte Delehaye's posthumously published edition of the Vita: "Saints de Tolentino: La _Vita Sancti Catervi_," _Analecta Bollandiana_ 61 (1943), 5-48. D.'s acidulous comments on this text make lively reading.
In addition to Tolentino's cathedral (rebuilt in the 1830s but still retaining bits of its thirteenth-century predecessor) another medieval monument now bearing C.'s name is Tolentino's Torrione San Catervo, a restored thirteenth-century macchiolated tower that was once part of the city's walls. It served as the Austrian command post at the battle of Tolentino in 1815, where Murat's defeat insured Hapsburg dominance in the north of Italy and Bourbon restoration in the south. Here's a view:
http://tinyurl.com/a3n7j
2) Rufus and Zosimus (d. ca. 106). According to St. Polycarp of Smyrna in his Epistle to the Philippians (chapter 9), R. and Z. were Christians caught up in the persecution of Trajan who accompanied St. Ignatius of Antioch (no. 3, below) on his enforced journey to Rome but who were martyred _en route_ at Philippi. Polycarp's reference to them was incorporated by Eusebius in his account of Ignatius in the _Historia Ecclesiastica_. From there (presumably in Rufinus' Latin translation), R. and Z. entered the historical martyrologies with Florus of Lyon, who entered them under 17. December. Ado, followed by Usuard, entered them under 18. December and gave them an elogium treating them as having been among the disciples who founded the primitive Church among Jews and Greeks. Both that elogium and the 18. December date of commemoration survived in the RM until its revision of 2001.
3) Ignatius of Antioch (d. ca. 107). The apparently Syrian I. became bishop of Antioch on the Orontes in about the year 69. Nothing specific is known about his episcopate. Sts. John Chrysostom and Jerome report that he had been in contact with Apostles. At some point during the persecution of the emperor Trajan I. was arrested and sent under guard to Rome. While _en route_ in Asia Minor I. wrote his seven surviving epistles. The majority were composed at Smyrna (where I. was welcomed by St. Polycarp); the remainder at Troas. Polycarp is our earliest source for I.'s martyrdom; St. Irenaeus of Lyon and Origen tell us that he was thrown to the beasts.
By the late fourth century Antioch claimed to have his relics; in the earlier fifth century the emperor Theodosius translated these to the former temple of the Tyche of Antioch, which building then became a Christian church dedicated to I. Relics said to be I.'s later came to Rome (where they were placed in the Basilica of San Clemente) and to other places in the West, where I.'s major feast was celebrated on 1. February. The revised RM of 2001 prefers today, his attested _dies natalis_ in late antique Antioch.
I.'s relics in Rome's San Clemente are said to lie with those of St. Clement in the confessio below the main altar. In these views the confessio is barely visible though the grille at center:
http://www.marcantonioarchitects.com/San_Clem_Figure4.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/j849l
Expandable views of a late fifteenth-century manuscript illumination of I. are here:
http://tinyurl.com/6frmfw
4) Martyrs of Volitanum (d. late 3d or early 4th cent.). We have no details of these African martyrs, on whose _dies natalis_ St. Augustine pronounced at least one sermon. Their feast on this day is recorded in the early sixth-century Calendar of Carthage.
5) John the Dwarf (d. prob. 398 or 409. We know about the Egyptian desert father J. (also John the hermit and John Colobus ['kolobos' being Greek for 'dwarf']) chiefly from his sayings in the _Apopthegmata Patrum_ and from a late seventh- or early eighth-century panegyric that survives in several languages and that underlies his notice in the Synaxary of Alexandria. J. spent most of his life as a hermit at the famous monastery of Skete, where he was ordained priest and where St. Arsenius the Great was one of his disciples. He was a contemporary of patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria (385-412). Late in life J. left Skete because of barbarian pressure and settled down in a place near today's Suez, where he died on this day in an unrecorded year. His death is said to have occurred on a Sunday (thus narrowing down the candidates for the likely year of his passing).
6) Dulcidius (d. 5th cent.). According to an 'ancient' breviary of Agen, D. (in French, Dulcet) succeeded St. Febadius as that city's bishop. He is said to have erected a basilica honoring Sts. Caprasius and Fides. Relics believed to be his are preserved in a late twelfth- or thirteenth-century century châsse and in a fourteenth-century arm reliquary of copper, both in the originally twelfth-century parish church of Saint-Dulcet at Chamberet (Corrèze). A distance view of the church (which was reworked in the nineteenth century):
http://tinyurl.com/62kg63
Best,
John Dillon
(Catervus revised from last year's post)
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