This appears to be the Antoninus the martyr who is stated by the Roman Martyrology to have suffered at Pamiers, where there are local legends about him. Some alleged relics were taken to Palencia in Spain, of which he is the patron, and which has its own version of the Pamiers legend. The name of St Antoninus is associated with those of SS. Almachius and John, who are supposed to have suffered with him, and has by another error become connected also with Capua, where “Antoninus, a boy”, is named with St Aristaeus, bishop and martyr, on Sep­tember 3.

A great deal of confusion has grown up around the mention of this martyr in the ancient martyrology known as the Hieronymianum. Delehaye (CMH., pp. 484—486) points out that there was an unquestionably authentic cultus of the Apamaean Antoninus, which is vouched for amongst others by Theodoret. The martyr is honoured, however, in the Greek synax­aries on November 9. See, further, Fr Delehaye, “Saints et reliquaires d’Apamée”, in Analecta Bollandiana, vol. liii (1935), pp. 225 seq.

INFORMATION about this saint is very unreliable, for it is obtained from no document earlier than the sixteenth century, at which time a popular devotion towards him began to grow up. He has been officially recognized as patron of the city of Avignon only since 1647. These late traditions say that Agricolus was born about the year 630, the son of St Magnus, a Gallo-Roman senator of the gens Albina, who after the death of his wife became first a monk at Lérins and then bishop of Avignon. Agricolus himself went to Lérins when he was fourteen and, making great progress in learning and virtue, was advanced to the priesthood. After sixteen years as a monk his father summoned him to the episcopal city. Here he was appointed archdeacon and distinguished himself by his preaching, by his powers of administration, and by his care for the poor, the oppressed and the sick. In 66o St Magnus consecrated his son bishop as his coadjutor. Ten years later Magnus died and St Agricolus succeeded both to his father’s see and to the success with which he administered it.

Most of the things related of St William have reference to his unwearying efforts to reform the behaviour of King Sweyn Estridsen. This prince having once caused some persons to be put to death not only without trial but also within the bounds of a church, the saint met him at the church door the next day and, holding out his pastoral staff, forbade him to enter the house of God till his hands were cleansed from the blood he had unjustly spilt; and seeing some of the courtiers draw their swords, he presented his neck, saying he was ready to die in defence of the Church of God. Sweyn publicly confessed his crime, and later gave some land to the church of Roskilde as a peace offering.

St William had affection for his troublesome sovereign, and for some years the saint and the penitent concurred to promote the cause of religion. Upon the death of the king his body was temporarily buried in the abbey he had founded at Ring­sted, till the cathedral of Roskilde should be ready for its reception. At the same time a tomb was prepared there for St William, and it is said that, while Sweyn’s body was being conveyed from Ringsted to Roskilde, St William came out to meet it and himself died at its approach, so that the two friends were borne together to burial. St William is named in Danish calendars hut he has never had a liturgical feast in his honour. He has been confused with St William of Eskill (April 6).

1038

SAINT STEPHEN CONFESSOR, KING OF HUNGARY—975-1038
Apud Albam Regálem, in Pannónia, item natális sancti Stéphani, Regis Hungarórum et Confessóris; qui, divínis virtútibus exornátus, primus Húngaros ad Christi fidem convértit, et a Deípara Vírgine, ipso die Assumptiónis suæ, in cælum recéptus fuit.  Ejus vero festívitas quarto Nonas Septémbris, quo die munitíssima Budæ arx, sancti Regis ope, recólitur, ex dispositióne Innocéntii Papæ Undécimi.
    At Alba Regalis in Hungary, St. Stephen, King of Hungary, who was graced with divine virtues, was the first to convert the Hungarians to the faith of Christ, and was received into heaven by the Virgin Mother of God on the very day of her Assumption.  By decree of Pope Innocent XI, his feast is kept on the 2nd of September, on which day the strong city of Buda, by the aid of the holy king, was recovered by the Christian army.

Sancti Stéphani, Regis Hungarórum et Confessóris; qui décimo octávo Kaléndas Septémbris obdormívit in Dómino.
    St. Stephen, king of Hungary and confessor, who fell asleep in the Lord on the 15th of August.

Stephen was soon engaged in wars with rival tribal leaders and others and when he had consolidated his position he sent St Astrik, whom he designed to be the first archbishop, to Rome to obtain Pope Silvester II’s approval for a proper ecclesiastical organization for his country ; and at the same time to ask his Holiness to confer upon him the title of king, which his nobles had long pressed him to assume and which he now asked that he might with more majesty and authority accomplish his designs for promoting the glory of God and the good of his people. Silvester was disposed to grant his request, and prepared a royal crown to send him with his blessing, acting no doubt in concert with political representations from the Emperor Otto III who was then in Rome. At the same time the pope con­firmed the religious foundations which the prince had made and the elections of bishops. St Stephen went to meet his ambassador upon his return and listened, standing with great respect, to the pope’s bulls whilst they were read to express his own sense of religion and to inspire his subjects with awe for whatever belonged to divine worship, he always treated the pastors of the Church with great honour and respect. The same prelate who had brought the crown from Rome crowned him king with great solemnity in the year 1001.* * The alleged bull of Pope Silvester granting the title of Apostolic King and Apostolic Legate to St Stephen, with the right to have a primatial cross home before him, is a forgery, probably of the seventeenth century. The upper part of the crown sent by the pope, fitted on to the lower part of a crown given to King Geza I by the Emperor Michael VII, is pre­served at Budapest.

Firmly to root Christianity in his kingdom and to provide for its steady progress after his own time, King Stephen established episcopal sees only gradually, as Magyar clergy became available; Vesprem is the first of which there is reliable record, but within some years Esztergom was founded and became the primatial see. At Szekesfehervar he built a church in honour of the Mother of God, in which the kings of Hungary were afterwards both crowned and buried. This city St Stephen made his usual residence, whence it was called Alba Regatis to dis­tinguish it from Alba Julia in Transylvania. He also completed the foundation of the great monastery of St Martin, begun by his father. This monastery, known as Martinsberg or Pannonhalma, still exists, and is the mother house of the Hungarian Benedictine congregation. For the support of the churches and their pastors and the relief of the poor throughout his dominions he commanded tithes to be paid. Every tenth town had to build a church and support a priest; the king himself furnished the churches. He abolished, not without violence, bar­barous and superstitious customs derived from the former religion and by severe punishments repressed blasphemy, murder, theft, adultery and other public crimes. He commanded all persons to marry except religious and churchmen, and forbade all marriages of Christians with idolators. He was of easy access to people of all ranks, and listened to everyone’s complaints, but was most willing to hear the poor, knowing them to be more easily oppressed and considering that in them we honour Christ who, being no longer among men on earth in His mortal state, has recommended to us the poor in His place and right.

It is said that one day, while the king was distributing alms in disguise, a troop of beggars crowding round him knocked him down, hustled him, pulled at his beard and hair, and took away his purse, seizing for themselves what he intended for the relief of many others. Stephen took this indignity humbly and with good humour, happy to suffer in the service of his Saviour, and his nobles, when they heard of this, were amused and chaffed him about it but they were also disturbed, and insisted that he should no more expose his person; but he renewed his re­solution never to refuse an alms to any poor person that asked him. The example of his virtue was a most powerful sermon to those who came under his influence, and in no one was it better exemplified than in his son, Bd Emeric, to whom St Stephen’s code of laws was inscribed. These laws he caused to be promulgated throughout his dominions, and they were well suited to a fierce and rough people newly converted to Christianity. But they were not calculated to allay the dis­content and alarm of those who were still opposed to the new religion, and some of the wars which St Stephen had to undertake had a religious as well as a political significance. When he had overcome an irruption of the Bulgarians he undertook the political organization of his people. He abolished tribal divisions and divided the land into “counties”, with a system of governors and magistrates. Thus, and by means of a limited application of feudal ideas, making the nobles vassals of the crown, he welded the Magyars into a unity; and by retaining direct control over the common people he prevented undue accumulation of power into the hands of the lords. St Stephen was indeed the founder and architect of the independent realm of Hungary. But, as Father Paul Grosjean, Bollandist, has remarked, to look at him otherwise than against his historical background gives as false an impression as to think of him as a sort of Edward the Confessor or Louis IX. And that background was a very fierce and uncivilized one.

As the years passed, Stephen wanted to entrust a greater part in the government to his only son, but in 1031 Emeric was killed while hunting. “God loved him, and therefore He has taken him away early”, cried St Stephen in his grief. The death of Emeric left him without an heir and the last years of his life were embittered by family disputes about the succession, with which he had to cope while suffering continually from painful illness. There were four or five claimants, of whom one, Peter, was the son of his sister Gisela, an ambitious and cruel woman, who since the death of her husband had lived at the Hungarian court. She had made up her mind that her son should have the throne, and shamelessly took advantage of Stephen’s ill-health to forward her ends. He eventually died, aged sixty-three, on the feast of the Assumption 1038, and was buried beside Bd Emeric at Szekes­fehervar. His tomb was the scene of miracles, and forty-five years after his death, by order of Pope St Gregory VII at the request of King St Ladislaus, his relics were enshrined in a chapel within the great church of our Lady at Buda. Innocent XI appointed his festival for September 2 in 1686, the Emperor Leopold having on that day recovered Buda from the hands of the Turks.

Concerning this story the novice in the Dialogue asks “What would you say was the cause of martyrdom in the case of this girl?” To which his preceptor replies “Simplicity and an innocent life, as I have already said. There are different kinds of martyrdom, namely, innocence, as in Abel; uprightness, as in the prophets and St John Baptist; love of the law, as in the Machabees confession of the faith, as in the apostles. For all these different causes Christ the Lamb is said to have been ‘slain from the beginning of the world’.” All Christian virtues, being protestations of our faith and proofs of our fidelity to God, are a true motive of martyrdom.

The other and better side of the picture may be represented by those émigré priests and people who made so good an impression and helped on the cause of Catholic emancipation in our own country, and by those many others who gave their lives rather than cooperate with the forces of irreligion. Such, for example, were the martyrs who suffered in Paris on September 2 and 3, 1792. In 1790 the Constituent Assembly had passed the civil constitution of the clergy, which the hierarchy at once condemned as unlawful all the diocesan bishops except four and most of the urban clergy refused to take the oath imposed by it. In the following year Pope Pius VI confirmed this con­demnation of the constitution as “heretical, contrary to Catholic teaching, sacri­legious, and opposed to the rights of the Church”. At the end of August 1792 the revolutionaries throughout France were infuriated by the rising of the peasants in La Vendée and the success of the arms of Prussia, Austria and Sweden at Longwy, and, inflamed by fierce rhetoric against the royalists and clergy who upheld their country’s foes, over fifteen hundred clergy, laymen and women were massacred. Of these victims 191 individuals were beatified as martyrs in 1926.

Early in the afternoon of September 2 several hundred rioters attacked the Abbaye, the former monastery where priests, loyal soldiers and other disaffected persons were imprisoned. Led by a ruffian called Maillard, they tendered the constitutional oath to a number of priests, all of whom refused it and were killed on the spot. A mock tribunal then condemned the rest of the prisoners en masse. Among the martyrs here was the ex-Jesuit (the Society was at that time suppressed) BD ALEXANDER LENFANT. He had been a confessor of the king, and a devoted friend of the royal family in its misfortunes. This led to his arrest and, in spite of the efforts of an apostate priest to get him released, he suffered martyrdom. Mgr de Salamon tells in his memoirs how he saw Father Lenfant quietly hearing the confession of another priest five minutes before both confessor and penitent were dragged out and slain.

Having been refreshed with wine and encouraged with pourboires by the mayor of Paris, a gang then made for the Carmelite church in the Rue de Rennes. Here were imprisoned over one hundred and fifty ecclesiastics, with one layman, BD CHARLES DE LA CALMETTE, Comte de Valfons, an officer in the cavalry who had voluntarily accompanied his parish priest into confinement. This noble company, led by BD JOHN MARY DU LAU, Archbishop of Arles, BD FRANCIS Joseph DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, Bishop of Beauvais, and his brother Bn PETER LOUIS, Bishop of Saintes, led a life of almost monastic regularity and astounded their gaolers by their cheerfulness and good temper. It was a sultry Sunday afternoon and the prisoners were allowed, on this day ordered, to take the air in the garden. While the bishops and some other clergy were saying Vespers in a chapel the murderers broke into the garden and killed the first priest they met. In the resulting panic Mgr du Lau came quietly out of the chapel. “Are you the archbishop?” he was asked. “Yes, sirs. I am the archbishop.” He was cut down by a sword stroke and killed by the thrust of a pike as he lay on the ground. Amid howls of execration shooting began right and left: several were killed and wounded and the Bishop of Beauvais’s leg was shattered by a bullet.

But the French sense of good order was outraged. A “judge” was appointed, who sat in a passage between the church and the sacristy, and two by two the confessors were brought in and had the constitutional oath tendered to them. Every one refused it without hesitation, and as each recalcitrant couple passed down the narrow staircase they were hacked to pieces. The Bishop of Beauvais was called for. He replied from where he lay:  “I do not refuse to die with the others, but I cannot walk. I beg you to have the kindness to carry me where you wish me to go.” There could have been no more telling rebuke than that courteous speech:  it did not save him, but silence fell on the murderers as he was brought forward and rejected the proffered oath. BD JAMES GALAIS, who had been in charge of the feeding arrangements of the prisoners, handed to the “judge “325 francs which he owed the caterer; BD JAMES FRITEYRE-DURVÉ, ex-Jesuit, was killed by a neigh­bour whom he knew in his own birthplace; three other ex-Jesuits and four secular priests were aged men who had only recently been turned out of a house of rest at Issy and made to walk to the Carmelite church; the Comte de Valfons and his confessor, BD John GUILLEMINET, met death side by side. Thus perished the martyrs who from their place of martyrdom are called “des Carmes”: the remaining forty or so were able to make their escape unseen or were allowed to slip away by conscience-stricken soldiers. Among the victims were BD AMBROSE AUGUSTINE CHEVREUX, superior general of the Maurist Benedictines, and two other monks; BD FRANCIS Louis HÉBERT, confessor of Louis XVI; three Franciscans; fourteen ex-Jesuits ; six diocesan vicars general ; thirty-eight members or former members of the Saint-Sulpice seminary; three deacons; an acolyte; and a christian Brother. The bodies were buried some in a pit in the cemetery of Vaugirard and some in a well in the garden of the Carmes.