Today, besides being the Fifth Sunday of Lent, is the feast of St. Vitalus, whose name means "lively," or "full of life," and so he was. He was a very early saint, a knight to a man named Paulinus. He had a wife Valeria (who was herself a martyr), and two sons, Gervasius and Protasius. This layman, who had a nice, respectable, middle-class kind of life, risked it all at the trial of the physician Unicinus. This man, tortured and wavering, was about to sacrifice to idols, when Vitalus spoke up: "O doctor and brother Unicinus, you have made a practice of curing others, do not now kill yourself with an eternal death! You have come to the palm by caring for the sufferings of many. Do not lose the crown prepared for you by God!" Well, the man recanted his (imminent) apostasy and abjured the sacrificing to the gods and the eating of the meat so sacrificed, but it cost Vitalus a great deal: first his freedom and then his life. See, nobody knew he was a Christian at that point (aside from his family and close circle of friends), and Paulinus turned him in to the authorities.
A pagan priest had him stretched on a rack and when that didn't sway him, had him buried alive in a cistern dug by a palm tree, where he sank into the mud to die. (Kind of like Jeremiah.) Not long later, it was thought that the priest himself was possessed by demons and was pushed -- or jumped -- into the river and drowned. Vitalus died during the reign of the Emperor Nero, which began in the year 52.
Brave St. Vitalus, help us to defend the truth and speak it.
No comments:
Post a Comment