No one even counted them. History only records the names of the Apostles Peter and Paul. All the others shine in the firmament of the Church like a constellation of anonymous stars. The Liturgy of June 30 celebrates them.
Newsdesk (June 30, 2021, 13:29, Gaudium Press) The first act of the drama of their martyrdom began on the night of July 19, 64. The watchmen, posted at key points in the Capital of the World, repeatedly sounded the trumpets. Warning sounds, well known and feared, soon followed by the first cries: “Fire!… Fire!… Fire!”
A fire endowed with great destructive power
In this overpopulated city, with poor neighborhoods pilled up with wooden houses, a fire was no more than an ordinary accident. This one, however, soon revealed itself to be endowed with great destructive power. In a few minutes, the increasingly terrified cries of “Fire!” spread through the streets of the popular neighborhood of the Great Circus and then to other areas.
The flames seemed to have spread through several regions at once, relentlessly devouring stores and residences. Encountering in their path some deposits of oil and other combustible materials, they spread throughout the Palatine and Celio hills. When they finally went out six days later, they had destroyed ten of the fourteen districts of the great imperial metropolis. So dreadful had been the catastrophe that it became impossible to calculate the number of dead.
“It is not allowed to be Christian”
During those terrible days, large groups of men prevented, by threats, the action of all those who wanted to put out the flames. Moreover, all the ancient historians agree that these men were fanning the flames.
The inhabitants of Rome immediately accused Nero of causing the fire or at least of having favored it. Ancient historians support this accusation, while some modern ones reject it.
Besides the historical controversy, the undeniable fact is that the monstrous Emperor, to get rid of the immense wave of indignation raised against him, blamed the Christians. For the man who killed his own mother, the fabrication of such a slander weighed very little on his conscience.
In consequence, Nero arrested, at first, all those who claimed to be Christians. Whistle-blowers moved by the most shameful interests soon made it possible for many others to be captured. Precisely how many? It is not known. One historian claims that it was “a great multitude.” They condemned them promptly to death.
Soon, a slogan spread throughout the Empire: “Non licet esse christianus” – It is not permitted to be a Christian.
Dreadful scenes of martyrdom
The brutal and gruesome scenes of this first persecution depict the two-thousand-year-old hatred of Satan and his human minions against the Holy Catholic Church.
The executioners did not limit themselves to torturing and then beheading or crucifying the innocent victims in spectacles in the Circus of Caligula and Nero, located on Vatican Hill. “Everything that can be conceived in the imagination of a sadist who was granted full freedom to practice evil, was put into practice in a nightmarish atmosphere,” says historian Daniel Rops in his monumental work History of the Church of Christ.
The Emperor ordered the garden of the imperial park to be open to the public. They organized “hunts” in which the targets were Christians dressed in the skins of ferocious animals. They chased them and were finally torn to pieces by dogs. The horns of bulls threw women into the air, allegorizing episodes from a pagan fable. There were even ignominious outrages and attacks on the virginity of maidens.
When night fell, the executioners raised numerous poles along the roads of the park, on which they tied up the bodies of Christians covered with resin and pitch and set them on fire to illuminate the “feast. Nero, dressed as a coachman, rode his horse-drawn carriage along the boulevards, filled with stunned spectators and lit by these human torches.
St. Roman Clement, the third successor of St. Peter, relates the horrifying scenes of that night, to which he was an eyewitness. And the Latin historian Tacitus, a man hostile to Christianity, wrote that such an excess of atrocity eventually raised among some portions of public opinion a movement of pity toward Christians.
These are the Protomartyrs of the Church of Rome. Their names are unknown on this earth, but in Heaven, they shine like suns for all eternity, and there they intercede for us who here celebrate their glorious memory.
Saint Peter and Saint Paul
The two most important men of the Holy Church also suffered martyrdom under Nero’s persecution. The Apostles Peter and Paul were arrested and locked up in the Mamertine prison, where they did not cease their apostolate, obtaining the conversion even of the jailers themselves.
They condemned The Prince of the Apostles to crucifixion. Judging himself unworthy to die like his Divine Master, he asked his executioners to crucify him upside down. The great Basilica of St. Peter’s stands on the site of his tomb.
The Apostle to the Gentiles, being a Roman citizen, deserved a little more consideration from the imperial authorities. Driven out of the city, he was beheaded and died on the Via Ostiense. On his tomb now stands the magnificent Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls.
Six million martyrs
Following this first persecution, nine others took place over the following 250 years, until the proclamation of the Edict of Milan in 313. They estimate that in this first phase of the Church 6 million martyrs sealed their faith in Our Lord Jesus Christ with death. That is, on average, 24,000 a year, 66 a day.
“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of new Christians. This blessed blood that watered the earth in the first centuries of Christianity continues to produce its fruits to this day and will do so until the day when all humanity is summoned to the ultimate act of history when the Glorious Christ will dictate the last sentence: “Come, you blessed of my Father” […] “Depart from me, you cursed” (Mt25, 34 and 41).
By Father Felipe Ramos
Published in Heralds of the Gospel Magazine, Year 4, June 2005, n. 42, pp. 32-33.
Compiled by Ena Alfaro