Blessed Sadoc and Companions

Blessed Sadoc and Companions were Dominicans of the priory at the Church of St. James in Sandomierz who were killed by the Tatars during the invasion at the turn of 1259 and 1260. Sadoc was a priest and the prior of this community. The Roman Martyrology commemorates them on June 2.

Little is known about Sadoc himself. The tradition of the Order identifies him with Brother Sadoc who in 1221, after the general chapter in Bologna, was sent together with Brother Paul of Hungary to establish a new Dominican province in Hungary; that Sadoc was later prior in Zagreb. Historians, however, are not certain that this is the same person, and it is not known when he came to Sandomierz.

It was the second Tatar invasion of Poland. The invaders took and laid waste to Sandomierz, killing many of its inhabitants, among them the friars of the priory of St. James. The Martyrology states that, as it is reported, they died singing the antiphon “Salve Regina,” bidding a last farewell to the Mother of Life. The exact day of their death is not known.

We know the details of these events mainly from later accounts, especially from the writings of the fifteenth-century chronicler Jan Długosz, and the sources differ on the number of friars who were killed. Tradition speaks of forty-nine martyrs, the prior included. In the seventeenth century the historian Abraham Bzowski recorded a legend according to which, before the attack, one of the friars, reading the martyrology, found in it the announcement of the martyrdom of forty-nine brothers in Sandomierz.

The friars were venerated as martyrs soon after their death. As early as 1295 Pope Boniface VIII granted indulgences connected with their commemoration. After centuries of efforts, Pope Pius VII in 1807 confirmed the cult that had long been given to them, which is equivalent to beatification. In memory of the martyrs, Polish Dominicans may wear a red belt. In 1959 archaeologists discovered at the Church of St. James a mass grave with about three hundred and thirty skeletons.

During his pilgrimage to Sandomierz on June 12, 1999, John Paul II recalled that in the thirteenth century this land was made fruitful by the blood of the martyrs of Sandomierz, clergy and laity, who died for the faith at the hands of the Tatars. Together with them he remembered Blessed Sadoc and 48 Dominicans of the priory at the Romanesque Church of St. James.