Saints Gervasius and Protasius

Saints Gervasius and Protasius are martyrs of the Church of Milan. Nothing certain is known about their life and death; we do not even know when they suffered martyrdom. What is well attested, however, is the finding of their relics by Saint Ambrose in 386. The Church commemorates them on June 19, the day on which Ambrose solemnly transferred their bodies to the new basilica he had built.

Ambrose, bishop of Milan, had just built a new basilica. The faithful asked him to dedicate it as solemnly as the churches in Rome, and he promised to do so if he found relics of martyrs. He himself wrote of a sudden presentiment, while Saint Augustine says that the place where they lay was shown to him in a vision. Ambrose had the ground dug in the church of Saints Nabor and Felix outside the city walls. There the remains of two men of great stature were found, with much blood. That same evening they were carried to the basilica of Fausta, and the next day to the new basilica, later named after Ambrose.

This took place during Ambrose’s conflict with Empress Justina, mother of the young emperor Valentinian, who favored the Arians and demanded a church for them. During the translation of the relics, a blind man well known in the city, a butcher named Severus, recovered his sight, and many possessed people were set free. The Arians disputed these miracles and claimed that the dead who had been found were not martyrs. Ambrose described all these events in a letter to his sister Marcellina.

Saint Augustine, who was living in Milan at the time and had not yet been baptized, witnessed these events; he received baptism from Ambrose in April 387. He speaks of them in the Confessions and in The City of God.

Ambrose laid the relics beneath the altar of the new basilica, in the place he had earlier set aside for his own grave, because he judged that it rightly belonged to the martyrs. When he died in 397, he was buried beside them. To this day they rest together in the crypt of the Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan.

Their cult quickly spread in Italy and Gaul, where churches were built in their honor. According to a later tradition, recorded in a letter falsely attributed to Ambrose, they were twin brothers, sons of the martyrs Vitalis and Valeria. Ambrose’s genuine letter says nothing of this, and the story cannot be confirmed. The Roman Martyrology names them alongside Saints Vitalis and Valeria as venerated from time immemorial, but does not speak of any family tie. Gervasius and Protasius were not canonized in a formal process; like other martyrs of the first centuries, they have been venerated since antiquity.