Feast day: June 30
The First Martyrs of the Holy Roman Church
The nameless multitude of Christians put to death in Rome under Nero after the great fire of the year 64 — burned, crucified, and thrown to beasts in the first imperial persecution.
The feast of the First Martyrs of the Holy Roman Church commemorates the Christians of Rome who were the earliest to die for the faith in the imperial capital — the nameless victims of the persecution unleashed by the emperor Nero in the year 64.
In July of that year a catastrophic fire destroyed much of Rome. Rumour blamed Nero himself for the blaze, and to deflect the suspicion he fixed the guilt upon the city's small and already disliked community of Christians. The historian Tacitus, no friend of the Christians, has left a chilling account of what followed.
Great numbers were arrested and put to death with deliberate cruelty designed as public spectacle: some were sewn into the skins of wild beasts and torn apart by dogs, some crucified, and some, Tacitus records, covered in pitch and burned alive as living torches to light Nero's gardens by night. It was, by tradition, in this same persecution that Sts. Peter and Paul would die.
These first Roman martyrs are honoured together, immediately after the feast of Peter and Paul, precisely because most of their names are unknown — a deliberate remembrance of the countless ordinary believers who laid down their lives, whose witness watered the soil from which the Roman Church would grow.
Blamed for a fire he likely set himself, Nero had Christians covered in pitch and burned as torches in his gardens — the Church's first great host of martyrs.
Image: Henryk Siemiradzki (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/10752c.htm
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