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The feast day of Saint Flavian, martyr, falls on February 18. Flavian was archbishop of Constantinople from AD 446 through 449. Though he lived long after the traditional age of Christian martyrs, Flavian is nonetheless accounted one of their number, though he was slain by men calling themselves Christians--indeed, he died either during or in the immediate aftermath of a Church Council. The deposition of Saint Flavian from Shea's The Pictorial Life of the Saints. As one of the principle parties at the so-called Robber Council of Ephesus, Flavian found himself on the wrong side of the powerful Patriarch of...

Flowers, candy, red hearts and romance. That's what Valentine's day is all about, right? Well, maybe not. The origin of this holiday for the expression of love really isn't romantic at all—at least not in the traditional sense. Father Frank O'Gara of Whitefriars Street Church in Dublin, Ireland, tells the real story of the man behind the holiday—St. Valentine. "He was a Roman Priest at a time when there was an emperor called Claudias who persecuted the church at that particular time," Father O'Gara explains. " He also had an edict that prohibited the marriage of young people. This was...

"Pray without ceasing on behalf of other men...For cannot he that falls rise again?"~Saint Ignatius of Antioch Ignatius of Antioch is one of the earliest of the Church fathers who left significant writings behind. Born in the mid-First Century AD, it is believed that he, along with Polycarp, were disciples of Saint John the Evangelist. Ecclesiastical historians of the fourth and fifth centuries mention that Ignatius was consecrated bishop of Antioch by Saint Peter himself. His feast day, on the traditional calendar, is February 1. Ignatius was martyred during the reign of Trajan, thus sometime between AD 98 and 117....

The totalitarian efforts to suppress and control Christian faith in China have taken a disturbing turn that reflects Beijing’s greater Orwellian aspirations of social control. In the communist nation, in which it is already quite dangerous to be a Christian, some churchgoers must now submit to facial and fingerprint scanning when they come to church. According to Bitter Winter, an online magazine exposing China’s human rights abuses and religious oppression, government thugs set up two biometric scanning stations at the entrance of the Muyang Church in Hubei. Now, before being allowed in to worship, Christians must line up to be...

If you’ve never heard of Saint Saturninus of Toulouse, you may be forgiven. Though obscure today, he was among the most illustrious early martyrs of the Church in France. His feast day is November 29. Saturninus is certainly worth knowing about, however, because the account of his death represents one of the most ancient extant Christian works to originate from the Roman province of Gaul. Saturninus was bishop of Tolosa — Toulouse in modern-day France. He was martyred either during the the persecution of Christians initiated by Decius (AD 250) or Valerian (AD 258). Saturninus is mentioned by the 6th...

November 22 is the feast day of one of the most ancient female martyrs of the Church – Saint Cecilia of Rome. Unlike many of the other early martyrs I have mentioned in this blog (eg. here, here, here, and here), Saint Cecilia’s Acts are considered by ecclesiastical scholars to be unreliable, having been composed two to three hundred years after her death. That said, there does seem to be broad agreement on some of the basic facts: 1.) There was a Christian martyr named Cecilia. 2.) She was martyred in Rome. 3.) She was buried in the catacombs of...

November 13 is the feast day of Saints Arcadius, Paschasius, Probus and Eutychianus. These four Spanish Roman martyrs were put to death by the cruel Vandal king, Geiseric, after he had completed his conquest of Roman Africa. Their martyrdom took place about AD 437 and their crime was refusing to accept the Arian heresy which was favored by the Vandals. Writing in the mid-5th century, not many years after the events described, the chronicler Prosper of Aquitaine recorded the following about these martyrs: In Africa, Geiseric, King of the Vandals, wanted to use the Arian impiety to undo the Catholic...

WASHINGTON (ChurchMilitant.com) - President Trump is honoring a Christian martyr by naming the mission to kill a top ISIS leader and her captor after her. In an address at the White House on Sunday, Trump announced that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a special forces raid in Syria while he and his security team watched. Also on Sunday, National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien told NBC's "Meet the Press" that the mission was named in honor of Kayla Mueller, captured in Syria in 2013 while working with humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders. Mueller spent 18 months in...

[Catholic Caucus] Five Heroic Men Who Withstood Hellfire for Their Faith August 25, 1624 marks the martyrdom of four priests and a brother On Aug. 25, 1624, five Catholic heroes faced hellish deaths for having brought Christ to the people of Japan. Burned at the stake in Ōmura, east of Nagasaki, was Jesuit Fr. Miguel Carvalho, S.J., Franciscan Frs. Luís Sotelo and Luís Sasada, Dominican Fr. Pedro Vázquez and Franciscan Br. Luís Baba. Padre Carvalho, the Jesuit, had entered Japan in 1622 on a Portuguese trading ship, having disguised himself as a soldier. The three Franciscans had been sent from...

In this scandal-plagued, retrograde age of the Catholic Church, we see the Faith dominated by members of the semi-heretical Society of Jesus, whose superior recently declared himself a baptized Buddhist, who said that the devil is merely a symbol, and suggested that we don't know what Jesus actually meant with regard to the indissolubility of marriage. This order, once so famous for its staunch defenders of the Faith, sturdy apostles to the wilderness nations, and glorious martyrs of superhuman courage and fidelity, has now reached the point where they are little more than a parody of Catholicism. Their institutions are...

The Gulag Archipelago in Romania: The Story No One Has Told Before Tomorrow, Friday May 31, Pope Francis will leave for Romania and on Sunday June 2, the last day of his journey, he will preside over the divine liturgy in Blaj, with the beatification of seven Greek Catholic bishops martyred “out of hatred for the faith” between 1950 and 1970, under the communist regime.These seven are only some of the Christians of Romania, bishops, priests, laity, who deserve the crown of martyrdom.Another among many is Ioan Ploscaru, a bishop who died in 1998 at the age of 87, fourteen...

Sister Inés Nieves Sancho a sewing teacher, the nun that was decapitated. Image: elespanol.com Tuesday’s slaughter took place after an armed group called 3R attacked two villages in the Central African Republic. At least 26 people have been killed, and many more wounded, in a massacre representing one of the biggest single losses of life in the Central African Republic (CAR) since a February peace deal. The UN’s peacekeeping mission in CAR (Minusca) reported on Wednesday that Tuesday’s slaughter took place after an armed group called 3R attacked two villages Koundjili and Djoumjoum, in the north-west of the country. The...

It is a common theme in our post-Christian age to tar the early Church with certain atrocities against philosophy and science. One of the accusations most commonly trotted out is that the Christians burned the world-famous library at Alexandria. This "perniciously persistent" myth is tidily demolished by David Bentley Hart in a 2010 article in First Things. But even if the myth were true, the Roman Christians had a model to follow in that Hellenistic pagans themselves consigned Christian books to the flames during the persecutions. For a period of about eight years in the early 4th century AD, it...

April 3 is the Catholic feast day of three sisters who were executed during the persecution of Diocletian in AD 303: Agape, Chionia and Irene. The three were citizens of the city of Thessalonica in Macedonia which was also the hometown of Diocletian's Caesar, or junior emperor, Galerius. It was Galerius who first instigated Diocletian to commence an empire-wide persecution of Christians, so it is perhaps not surprising to find the attack being pressed so vigorously there. We are fortunate that the authentic acts of these martyrs have come down to us from antiquity largely intact. The transcript of their...

On March 7, AD 203, during the reign of the emperor Septimius Severus, five Christians were martyred in the amphitheater of Carthage under the procurator Hilarian. The three men were named Revocatus, Saturus, and Saturninus. The two women, however, are more famous, having their names entered into the Roman Canon of the Mass: Felicitas, a slave eight months pregnant, and Perpetua, a young Roman matron of noble birth who had recently given birth to a child. Unlike many of the Acts of these early martyrs, the antiquity and authenticity of the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas is not seriously challenged...

In AD 303 on February 23, the Christian church of Nicomedia in Roman Bithynia was utterly destroyed. In this case, by “church” I am referring to the physical building as opposed to the human beings of Nicomedia who professed the Christian faith. Their destruction would come later. The pulling down of the church of Nicomedia marked the beginning of a violent, Roman Empire-wide repression of Christianity known to future generations as the Great Persecution. This state-sponsored attack would be the most violent, wide-ranging, and longest-lasting effort of the Roman government to wipe out the hated Christian sect. It would also...

Duty change in Mindong diocese should be read with goodwill: bishop A Vatican delegation has been in China this week for talks about the implementation of a bishop-appointment agreement signed between the two sides, said a Holy See spokesperson. The delegation is in China for talks with "both government and church officials" to work on "practical steps" to implement the recent provisional agreement, Greg Burke, director of the Holy See press office, told the Global Times in an emailed statement on Friday local time. The content of the provisional agreement on the appointment of bishop has not been made public...

A sad picture of the world we live in, especially onlineThe BBC has reported Wednesday on an American man killed on North Sentinel Island. “Tribespeople shot him with arrows and left his body on the beach.” He may have been a Christian missionary, according to the BBC: “Local media have reported that Chau may have wanted to meet the tribe to preach Christianity to them.” The people of North Sentinel Island are one of the last isolated ethnic groups on earth. The Indian government forbids any visitors to the island, and natives routinely greet strangers with violence. Cruel HatredBe that...

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò In thin-skinned times such as these, Archbishop Viganò’s most recent letter shines forth as a clarion call to Catholics everywhere. As I finished reading Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s third letter, I had an immediate sense that I had just read something destined to be one of the great pastoral and literary moments of the Church’s history. There was an air of greatness about it that I cannot fully describe. I was stunned at its soteriological quality — at its stirring and yet stark reminder of our own judgment day. In effect he reminded us that...

White Simple “A SIMPLE AND UPRIGHT MAN, and fearing God, and avoiding evil:” such is the description of the just man in the lessons of the night Office for the time, and it is the portrait of the holy monk whom the Church offers us today for our admiration, our imitation, and our devotion. Fleeing from men in order to find God, he quitted his native land, where his rank, and still more his virtues, prevented him from being unknown. He wandered from the coasts of Greece to the borders of the Rhone, and stopped at length in the...