Alexander, Felix, Januarius, Philip, Silvanus, Vitalis and Martial, the seven sons of Saint Felicitas, were martyred after Felicitas told them: “Look up to Heaven, where Jesus Christ with His saints expects you. Be faithful in His love, and fight courageously for your souls.” The Prefect ordered that she be beaten for her insolence, and after refusing to worship the pagan gods of Rome, her children were whipped and imprisoned. Antoninus Pius ordered that they be sent to different judges and be condemned to different deaths. Januarius was scourged to death, Felix and Philip were beaten to death with clubs, Silvanus was thrown head-long into the Tiber, and Alexander, Vitalis and Martial were beheaded, as was Felicitas. Felix and Philip were buried in the cemetery of Saint Priscilla. Martial, Vitalis and Alexander were intered in the cemetery known as the “Jordanorum,” Januarius in that of Saint Praetextatus, and Silvanus was laid to rest in the cemetery of Saint Maximus.
Ruffina and Secunda were the twin virgin daughters of the Roman nobles Asterius and Aurelia. At a young age they were betrothed to the young patricians Armentarius and Verinus. Terrified by the persecution of Christians under Valerian and Gallienus, the promised husbands renounced their faith, but Ruffina and Seconda persevered to the end. After being tortured they were martyred on the Via Cornelia in 257 AD.
Dom Prosper Guéranger:
Three times within the next few days will the number seven appear in the holy Liturgy, honouring the Blessed Trinity and proclaiming the reign of the Holy Spirit with His sevenfold grace. Felicitas, Symphorosa and the mother of the Machabees, each in turn will lead her seven sons to the feet of Eternal Wisdom. The Church, bereaved of her Apostolic founders, pursues her course undaunted, for the teaching of Peter and Paul is defended by the testimony of martyrdom, and when persecutions have ceased, by that of holy virginity. Moreover, “the blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians” (Tertullian). The heroes who in life were the strength of the Bride give her fecundity by their death, and the family of God’s children continues to increase. Great indeed was the faith of Abraham when he hoped against all hope that he would become the father of nations through that same Isaac whom he was commanded to slay: but did Felicitas show less faith when she recognised in the immolation of her seven children the triumph of life and the highest blessing that could be bestowed on her motherhood?
Honour be to her, and to those who resemble her! The worldly-wise may scorn them, but they are like noble rivers transforming the desert into a paradise of God and fertilising the soil of the gentile world after the ravages of the first age. Marcus Aurelius had just ascended the throne to prove himself during a reign of nineteen years nothing but a second-rate pupil of the sectarian rhetors of the second century whose narrow views and hatred of Christian simplicity he embraced alike in policy and in philosophy. These men, created by him prefects and proconsuls, raised the most cold blooded persecution the Church has ever known. The scepticism of this imperial philosopher did not exempt him from the general rule that where dogma is rejected, superstition takes its place. And monarch and people were of one accord in seeking a remedy for public calamities in the rites newly brought from the East, and in the extermination of the Christians. The assertion that the massacres of those days were carried on without the prince’s sanction, not only does not excuse him, it is moreover false. It is now a proven truth that foremost among the tyrants who destroyed the flower of the human race, stands Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, stained more than Domitian or even Nero with the blood of Martyrs.
The seven sons of Saint Felicitas were the first victims offered by the prince to satisfy the philosophy of his courtiers, the superstition of the people and, be it said, his own convictions, unless we would have him to be the most cowardly of men. It was he himself who ordered the prefect Publius to entice to apostasy this noble family whose piety angered the gods. It was he again who, after hearing the report of the cause, pronounced the sentence and decreed that it should be executed by several judges in different places, the more publicly to make known the policy of the new reign. The arena opened at the same time in all parts not only of Rome, but of the empire. The personal interference of the sovereign intimated to the hesitating magistrates the line of conduct to pursue if they wished to court the imperial favour. Felicitas soon followed her sons. Justin the philosopher found out by experience what was the sincerity of Caesar’s love of truth. Every class yielded its contingent of victims to the tortures which this would-be wise master of the world deemed necessary for the safety of the empire. At length, that his reign might close as it had begun in blood, a rescript of the so-called mild emperor sanctioned wholesale massacres. Humanity, lowered by the unjust flattery heaped on this wretched prince even up to our own day, was thus duly rehabilitated by the noble courage of a slave such as Blandina, or of a patrician such as Caecilia.
Never before had the south-wind swept so impetuously through the garden of the Spouse, scattering far and wide the perfume of myrrh and spices. Never before had the Church, like an army set in array, appeared despite her weakness so invincible as now, when she was sustaining the prolonged assault of Caesarisin and false science from without, in league with heresy within. Want of space forbids us to enter into the details of a question which is now beginning to be more carefully studied, yet is far from being thoroughly understood. Under cover of the pretended moderation of the Antonines, Hell was exerting its most skilful endeavours against Christianity at the very period which opened with the martyrdom of the Seven Brothers. If the Caesars of the third century attacked the Church with a fury and a refinement of cruelty unknown to Marcus Aurelius, it was but as a wild beast taking a fresh spring on the prey that had well near escaped him.
Such being the case, no wonder that the Church has from the very beginning paid special honour to these seven heroes, the pioneers of that decisive struggle which was to prove her impregnable to all the powers of Hell. Was there ever a more sublime scene in that spectacle which the saints have to present to the world? If there was ever a combat which angels and men could equally applaud, it was surely this of the 10th July 162 when in four different suburbs of the Eternal City, these seven patrician youths, led by their heroic mother, opened the campaign which was to rescue Rome from these upstart Caesars and restore her to her immortal destinies. After their triumph, four cemeteries shared the honour of gathering into their crypts the sacred remains of the martyrs, and the glorious tombs have in our own day furnished the Christian archaeologist with matter for valuable research and learned writings. As far back as we can ascertain from the most authentic monuments, the 6th of the Ides of July was marked on the calendars of the Roman Church as a day of special solemnity on account of the four stations where the faithful assembled round the tombs of “the Martyrs.” This name, given by excellence to the seven brothers, was preserved to them even in time of peace — an honour by so much the greater as there had been torrents of blood shed under Diocletian. Inscriptions of the fourth century, found even in those cemeteries which never possessed their relics, designate the 11th July as the “day following the feast of the Martyrs”
The honours of this day on which the Church sings the praises of true fraternity, are shared by two valiant sisters. A century had passed over the empire, and the Antonines were no more. Valerian, who at first seemed, like them, desirous of obtaining a character for moderation, soon began to follow them along the path of blood. In order to strike a decisive blow, he issued a decree whereby all the principal ecclesiastics were condemned to death without distinction, and every Christian of rank was bound under the heaviest penalties to abjure his faith. It is to this edict that Rufina and Secunda owed the honour of crossing their palms with those of Sixtus and Lawrence, Cyprian and Hippolytus. They belonged to the noble family of the Turcii Asterii, whose history has been brought to light by modern discovery. According to the prescriptions of Valerian, which condemned Christian women to no more than confiscation and exile, they ought to have escaped death. But to the crime of fidelity to God they added that of holy virginity, and so the roses of martyrdom were twined into their lily-wreaths. Their sacred relics lie in Saint John Lateran’s, close to the baptistery of Constantine. And the second Cardinalitial See, that of Porto, couples with this title the name of Santa Rufina, thus claiming the protection of the blessed martyrs.
“Praise the Lord, you children, praise the Name of the Lord: who makes the barren woman to dwell in a house, the joyful mother of children.” Such is the opening chant of this morning’s Mass. But say, O blessed ones, was your admirable mother barren who gave seven martyrs to the Earth? Fecundity according to this world counts for nothing before God. This is not the fruitfulness intended by that blessing which fell from the lips of the Lord when in the beginning He made man to His own image. “Increase and multiply” was spoken to a holy one, a son of God, bidding him propagate a divine offspring. As the first creation, so was all future birth to be: man, in communicating his own existence to others, was to transmit to them at the same time the life of their Father in Heaven. The natural and the supernatural life were to be as inseparable as a building and its foundation. Nature without grace would be but a frame without a picture. All too soon did sin destroy the harmony of the divine plan. Nature violently separated from grace could produce only sons of wrath. Yet God was too rich in mercy to abandon the design of His immense love, and having in the first instance created us to be His children, He would now re-create us as such in His Word made Flesh. Reduced to a shadow of what it would have been, the union of Adam and Eve, unable to give birth immediately to sons of God, was dismantled of that glory beside which the sublime privileges of the Angels would have paled: nevertheless it was still the figure of the great mystery of Christ and the Church. Sterile according to God and doomed to the death she had brought upon her race, it was only by participation in the merits of the second Eve that the first could be called the mother of the living. Great honour indeed was still to be hers, and she would be able in part to repair her fall, but on condition of yielding to the rights of the Bride of the second Adam. Far better than Pharaoh’s daughter rescuing Moses and confiding him to Jochabed, could the Church say to every mother on receiving her babe from the waters: “Take this child and nurse him for me.” And every Christian mother, anxious to correspond to the Church’s trust in her and proud of being able to realise God’s primitive intentions, might well repeat with regard to this second childbirth those words uttered by a superhuman love: “My little children, of whom I am in labour again, until Christ be formed in you” (Galatians iv. 19). Shame on her that would forget the sublime destiny of her child to be a son of God! A far less crime would it be, were she, through negligence or by design, to stifle in him by an education exclusively directed to the senses, that intelligence which distinguishes man from the animals subjected to his power. For the attainment of man’s true end, the supernatural life is more necessary than the life of reason. For a mother to make no account of it, and to suffer the divine germ to perish after being planted in the infant’s soul at its new birth from the sacred font, would be to do to death the frail being that owed its existence to her.
Far otherwise, O martyrs, did your illustrious mother understand her mission! Hence, though her memory is honoured on the day when four months after you she quitted this Earth, yet this present feast is the chief monument of her glory. She, more than yourselves, is celebrated in the readings and chants of the Holy Sacrifice and in the lessons of the Night Office. And why is this? Because, says Saint Gregory, being already the handmaid of Christ by faith, she has today become His mother, according to our Lord’s own word, by giving Him a new birth in each of her seven sons. After having made such a complete holocaust of you to your heavenly Father, what will her own martyrdom be but the long-desired close of her widowhood, the happy hour which will reunite her in glory to you who are doubly her sons? Hence forward, then, on this day which was to her the day of suffering, but not of reward, when after passing seven times over through tortures and death, she had yet to remain in banishment, it is but just that her children should rise and make over to her, as of right, the honours of the triumph. Henceforth, though still an exile, she is clothed with purple, dyed not twice, but seven times. The richest daughters of Eve own that she has surpassed them all in the fruitfulness of martyrdom. Her own works praise her in the assembly of the saints. On this day, O sons and mother, and you two noble sisters who share in their glory, listen to our prayers, protect the Church and make the whole world heedful of the teaching conveyed by your beautiful example!Also on this day according to the ROMAN MARTYROLOGY:
In Africa, the holy martyrs Januarius, Marinus, Nabor and Felix who were beheaded.
At Nicopolis in Armenia, the holy martyrs Leontius, Mauritius, Daniel and their companions, who after being tortured in different manners, were finally cast into the fire, and thus terminated their long martyrdom, in the time of the emperor Licinius and the governor Lysias.
In Pisidia, the holy martyrs Bianor and Silvanus, who merited an immortal crown by being decapitated after enduring most bitter torments for the name of Christ.
At Iconium, St. Apollonius, martyr, who consummated his glorious martyrdom by death on the cross.
At Ghent, St. Amelberga, virgin.
And in other places, many other holy martyrs, confessors and virgins.
Thanks be to God.
