During the third century paganism and Christianity vied for supremacy in the Roman Empire. Hoping to stifle the Church completely, the emperor Diocletian in 303 began the last and fiercest of the persecutions. In time, Christian charity conquered pagan brutality, and as the Church attracted more and more members, the Roman government would be compelled to recognize its existence, but it was only after almost three hundred years, during which persecutions had forced Christian worship underground, that the Church would finally come out into the open after the Edict of Nantes in 313. It was still young and disorganized, vulnerable to heresy and apostasy, and needed a strong leader to settle questions of doctrine and discipline.
Such a leader came to the Chair of Peter in 304, when Saint Marcellus was elected pope. Saint Marcellinus, his predecessor, while being taken to torture, had exhorted him not to cede to the decrees of Diocletian, and it became evident that Marcellus did not intend to temporize. He established new catacombs and saw to it that the divine mysteries were continually celebrated there. Then three years of relative peace were given the church when Maxentius became emperor in 307, for he was too occupied with other difficulties to persecute the Christians.
After assessing the problems facing the Church, Saint Marcellus planned a strong program of reorganization. Rome then as now was the seat of Catholicism, and his program was initiated there. He divided the territorial administration of the Church into twenty-five districts or parishes, placing a priest over each one, thus restoring an earlier division which the turmoil of the persecutions had disrupted. This arrangement permitted more efficient care in instructing the faithful, in preparing candidates for baptism and penitents for reconciliation. With these measures in force, Church government took on a definite form.
Marcellus’ biggest problem was dealing with the Christians who had apostatized during the persecution. Many of these were determined to be reconciled to the Church without performing the necessary penances. The Christians who had remained faithful demanded that the customary penitential discipline be maintained and enforced. Marcellus approached this problem with uncompromising justice; the apostates were in the wrong, and regardless of the consequences, were obliged to do penance. It was not long before the discord between the faithful and the apostates led to violence in the very streets of Rome.
An account of Marcellus’ death, dating from the fifth century, relates that Maxentius, judging the pope responsible for the trouble between the Christian factions, condemned him to work as a slave on the public highway. After nine months of this hard labor, he was rescued by the clergy and taken to the home of a widow named Lucina; this woman welcomed him with every sign of respect and offered him her home for a church. When the emperor learned that Christian rites were being celebrated there, he profaned the church by turning it into a stable and forced the Holy Father to care for the animals quartered there. In these sad surroundings, Marcellus died on January 16, 310. He was buried in the catacombs of Priscilla, but later his remains were placed beneath the altar of the church in Rome which still bears his name.
Source: Les Petits Bollandistes: Vies des Saints, by Msgr. Paul Guérin (Bloud et Barral: Paris, 1882), Vol. 1.
Blessed Stephanie was born near Brescia, Italy, in 1457, of fervent Christian parents. She was brought up in the village of Soncino, where there was a Dominican monastery well known for its preachers, eminent in doctrine, eloquence and sanctity. One of them knew her family and taught their little daughter the Ave Maria and other prayers. He told her that when he died he would make her his heir. A few years later, when Blessed Matthew Carreri died, she felt her heart painfully wounded, and suddenly saw the deceased man, who told her this was the heritage he had promised her. Suffering was to be her lot, and her existence was one of those of which people say: “It is more admirable than imitable.”
Our Lord appeared to Stephanie when she was seven years old, accompanied by His holy Mother, Saint Dominic, Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Catherine of Siena, and told her He wanted her to be a Dominican like those great Saints. She promised she would enter a monastery, or at least be a member of the Third Order of Saint Dominic. Later in her life it was this latter path that she adopted, and she was given the habit of the Third Order. When she was about eleven years old, on the feast of Saint Andrew she saw that Apostle with a large cross, and he said to her: “My daughter, this is the road to heaven. Love God, fear God, honor God, embrace the cross, and flee the world.” She began then to practice great austerities; even while working in the fields with her parents she wore a hair shirt and a rope cincture full of knots. She fasted perpetually. At the age of fifteen, on Good Friday, Our Lord told her she would endure in each of her members part of what He Himself had suffered. Her head afterwards bore traces of a crowning with thorns, and many persons saw her, every week on Fridays, suffering a kind of agony.
For forty years, she also endured the worst moral sufferings. She was in darkness, aridity, abandonment. This martyrdom of the soul was a worse torment for her than that of the body. An Angel said to her: “There are several means which cause a reasonable creature to rise to perfect love of God, but one of the principal ones is the life of suffering, a life steeped in sorrow and bitterness which must be accompanied and followed by thanksgiving and resignation to the divine Will. Affliction is the road to perfect love and perfect transformation.” She was given Saint Paul to be her guide and instruct her in the secrets of mystical theology, that is, of the interior life under the immediate direction of God.
Blessed Stephanie could read in souls, and one day prevented a woman from poisoning fourteen persons, as she had resolved to do. She warned her not to accomplish that crime; otherwise, she herself would accuse her. She applied herself to the works of mercy and cared for the sick and the poor. She had to earn her bread by manual work; she begged in addition for alms for the needy. She became known to the nobility of Italy, who wanted to give her residences and keep her in their own regions; she remained nonetheless in Soncino, in a very poor dwelling. She was helped by the wealthy when she established a monastery in Soncino. This monastery, where about thirty young Sisters labored to attain religious perfection, and which she directed, was exempted from all taxes. She fell ill towards the end of the year 1529 and died on January 2, 1530, at the age of seventy-three years, saying, “Lord, into Thy hands I commend my spirit!” Many miracles at her tomb made known her sanctity. She was beatified in 1740 by Pope Benedict XIV.
Saint Honoratus was of a consular Roman family that had settled in Gaul. In his youth he renounced the worship of idols and gained his elder brother, Venantius, to Christ. The two brothers, convinced of the hollowness of the things of this world, desired to renounce it with all its pleasures, but a fond pagan father put continual obstacles in their way. At length, taking with them for their director Saint Caprais, a holy hermit, they sailed from Marseilles to Greece, intending to live there unknown in a desert. Venantius soon died happily at Methone, and Honoratus, who was ill, was obliged to return to Gaul with his guide.
He first led the life of a hermit in the mountains near Frejus. Two small islands lie in the sea near that coast; on the smaller, now known as Saint HonorÉ, the Saint settled, and when others came to him there, he founded the famous monastery of Lerins, about the year 400. Some of his followers he appointed to live in community; others, who seemed more perfect, in separated cells as anchorites. His rule was borrowed in large part from that of Saint Pachomius.
Nothing can be more amiable than the description Saint Hilary has given of the excellent virtues of this company of saints, especially of the charity, concord, humility, compunction, and devotion which reigned among them under the conduct of their holy Abbot. Saint Honoratus was, by compulsion, consecrated Archbishop of Arles in 426, and died, exhausted with austerities and apostolical labors, in 429.
Reflection. The soul cannot truly serve God while it is involved in the distractions and pleasures of the world. Saint Honoratus knew this, and chose to be a servant of Christ his Lord. Resolve, in whatever state you are, to live absolutely detached from the world in spirit, and to separate yourself corporeally as much as possible from it.
