Feast day: January 22
St. Vincent of Saragossa
A Spanish deacon whose calm courage under brutal torture so impressed his persecutors that his fame spread across the early Church within a generation.
Vincent was a deacon of the church of Saragossa in Spain, ordained and instructed by its bishop, Valerius, who because of a difficulty in speech entrusted the preaching of the diocese to his gifted young deacon. When the persecution under Diocletian reached Spain around the year 304, both bishop and deacon were arrested and brought before the Roman governor Dacian at Valencia.
The aged bishop was sent into exile, but the governor turned the full force of his cruelty on Vincent, determined to break so prominent a Christian. The early accounts, echoed by the poet Prudentius not long after, describe a sequence of fearful tortures — the rack, iron hooks, a bed of hot coals — through all of which the deacon is said to have remained not merely steadfast but strangely serene, even cheerful, as though the suffering touched only his body.
It was this calm under torment, more than the tortures themselves, that fixed his memory in the early Church. He died of his wounds in prison, and his cult spread with remarkable speed across the Christian world; within a century St. Augustine could preach that Vincent's feast was kept and his name known throughout the whole Roman Empire.
Many legends gathered around the fate of his body — cast out unburied yet guarded, the tradition says, by a raven, then thrown into the sea and washed back to shore. He became the patron of vine-dressers and winemakers, perhaps through wordplay on his name or the season of his feast, and one of the most venerated of the early Spanish martyrs.
St. Augustine preached that the whole Roman world knew Vincent's name — his serenity under torture became one of the most retold martyr stories.
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