ROME LETTER

New Zealand Tablet, 1 June 1916, Page 45

ROME LETTER

(From our own correspondent.) March 24. SAINT FELICITAS AND HER SEVEN MARTYRED SONS. ' ' Between the Irish College and the Roman Forum tower three huge fluted Corinthian columns, all that now remains of the great temple of Mars Ultor (Mars the Avenger), which ancient writers - lauded as being one.of the most magnificent, one of the most perfect works of man. Many are the memories connected with its great past; but to-day chief of them is the fact that it was here St. Felicitas and her seven sons were commanded by the Prefect of Rome to burn incense to Rome’s false gods; these were SS. Januarius, Felix, Philip, Alexander, Vitalis, and Martialis, and Silanus, the youngest. Pope St. Gregory the Great, in a homily delivered beside the good mother’s tomb on the Via Salaria, said of her:

‘ St. Felicitas having seven children, was as much afraid of leaving them behind her on earth as other mothers are of surviving theirs. She was more than a martyr, because, seeing her seven dear children martyred before her eyes, she was in some sort a martyr in each of them. She was the eighth in order of time, but was from the first to the last in pain, and began her martyrdom with the eldest, completing it only with her death.’

Rarely, even in the Roman persecutions of the greatest ferocity, was an entire family put to death together. But that of St. Felicitas was noble by birth and an ardent follower of Christianity, and therefore Publius, Prefect of Rome, pursued it with an implacable hatred. No time was lost by this functionary in getting Marcus Aurelius to sign the death warrant, which he presented to the lord of the then known world in the year 162 A.D. For at the temple of Mars Ultor, while under process of interrogation, the heroic mother told the judges of how carefully her seven sons had been reared Christians, how neither she nor they would sacrifice to the idols of Rome, how they were all ready to die for the faith. Then, turning to her sturdy boys, she cried Look up to heaven, my sons. Christ with His Saints is waiting for you there.’ After this the eight were Hurried off to die. Now, of all the Acts of the Martyrs the account of the scenes that followed is believed by critics to be the most genuine. Marucchi,. of Rome, says the account of it is of great antiquity. Tillement declares the Latin document is a translation of the Greek. While De Rossi and ' Allard were of the opinion that the ‘ Acta ’ that we have are really an extract of the trial of the family at the Prefect’s tribunal. Strangely enough the Prefect did not have the whole family killed off together, nor in the same manner. Januarius was beaten to death by rods, Felix and Philip were torn to pieces, Alexander was thrown from a precipice (probably from the Tarpeian Rock), Vitalis and Martialis were transfixed with spears, and Silanus, along with his brave mother, died by .decapitation. The ‘ Acta ’ make no mention ' of the day on which the martyrdom took place, but in a .document of the fourth century, the most ancient calendar of the Church, under the date of the 10th of July, we have a record of .the feast celebrated in honor of these martyrs, an English translation of which is as follows: —• * 10th July—The “depositio” of Felix arid Philip , ; in the cemetery of Priscilla, and in that of the Giordani . ' . the “depositio” of Martialis, Vitalis, and Alexander; and in the cemetery of Maximus the “depositio” of Silanus, and the “depositio” of Januarius in the cemetery of Praetextatus.’ So the bodies were divided into four groups for burial by their, fellow Christians, and laid to rest in extreme points in the surroundings of Rome. The term ‘cemetery’ is, I need not point out, to be taken to mean our modern word catacomb.’ . . ... -

THE FOUR GROUPS OF GRAVES.

The only reason .one can think of to explain the action of the early Christians in not bringing" the remains of the mother and her seven sons together, or at least in the same catacomb, is the desire to avoid attracting the attention of the pagans. Even during the persecution of Marcus Aurelius it would be quite easy to carry one or two bodies along the Appian Way, or along the Via Salaria, but it would be a very different task, one fraught with danger and difficulty, to carry eight corpses to the same catacomb. So they laid St. Januarius alone on the Via Appia, in the cemetery of Praetextatus; and his crypt was discovered by De Rossi in 1863. In 759 Pope Leo 111. had the bodies of St. Felicitas and St. Silanus taken from the Catacomb of Maximus on the Via Salaria, and enshrined in -the Church of St. Susanna within the city walls. In the course of time the very existence of the crypt, where they had slept for, over .five centuries, was' forgotten, and it was not discovered till 1885, when the workmen engaged on the foundations of the moderlx Via Sinetosi accidentally came upon the hallowed spot. ’ Only a few years later, while excavators were engaged exploring in the depths of the Catacomb of Priscillathe most ancient and most venerable of all the cemeteries, inasmuch as in its depths, St. Peter, Prince of. the Apostles, had his Chair and preached to the faithful and baptised his catechumens place where St. Felix and St. Philip had been laid in the year 16? was discovered. So far the spot where St. Alexander, St. Vitalis, and St. Martialis were laid in the Catacomb of the Giordani, also on the Via Salaria, remains undiscovered.