Saints Marcellinus and Peter

Saints Marcellinus and Peter were martyrs of the Church of Rome. Marcellinus was a priest and Peter an exorcist, that is, a cleric of one of the minor orders that existed in the Latin Church. They died during the persecution under the emperor Diocletian. Their names are recited in the Roman Canon, Eucharistic Prayer I. The Church commemorates them on June 2.

Nothing certain is known about their lives before their martyrdom. The oldest testimony to their death is a verse inscription that Pope Saint Damasus placed on their tomb in the fourth century. In it Damasus writes that as a young man he heard the story from the executioner himself. The inscription was later destroyed by the Goths, and Pope Vigilius had it restored.

According to this testimony, they were ordered to be beheaded in a dense thicket, so that no one could know where they were buried. Before their death they had to prepare their grave with their own hands. Tradition gives 304 as the year of their martyrdom. A later account of their death adds conversions in prison and miracles, but historians do not regard these details as reliable.

Later a devout woman named Lucilla found their bodies and laid them in the cemetery Ad duas lauros, “at the Two Laurels,” on the Via Labicana, today’s Via Casilina, outside Rome. The emperor Constantine built a basilica there, whose ruins have been uncovered again in our time. The whole cemetery took the name of the two martyrs. Their catacombs still exist and are open to visitors.

Their commemoration on June 2 is already recorded in the Hieronymian Martyrology of the fifth and sixth centuries. In the ninth century Einhard, the biographer of Charlemagne, brought their relics to his estate on the Main, which he named Seligenstadt, and founded a Benedictine abbey there. Marcellinus and Peter were not canonized in a formal process: like other martyrs of the first centuries, they have been venerated since antiquity. In the General Roman Calendar their memorial is optional.