Adrian of Nicomedia, Saint, Martyr

ADRIAN OF NICOMEDIA, Saint, Martyr. - According to the legendary Passio, A. was converted following the courageous bearing, during torture, of 23 Christians, victims of the Diocletianic persecution, and was put to death with them. His wife Natalia, present at the martyrdom, buried him at Byzantium. The Greeks venerate him on 26 August, while the Jeronymian Martyrology commemorates him on 4 March. Pope Honorius (625-38) dedicated a church to him in the Roman Forum, adapting for that purpose the hall of the senatorial Curia. This church, called S. Hadriani in tribus fatis (because of the nearby group of the three Fates), was erected as a deaconry by Adrian I (772-95). A constitutum, attributed by the Liber Pontificalis (ed. L. Duchesne, I, p. 376) to Pope Sergius I (687-701), declares that the church of S. Adriano was to serve as the meeting and starting point for the litanic procession on the feasts of the Most Holy Mary: the Purification, the Annunciation, the Assumption and the Nativity. The commemoration of St. Adrian on 8 September, recorded in certain manuscripts of the Jeronymian Martyrology, in the Gregorian Sacramentary and in the Gelasian Sacramentary of the 8th century, has not yet been explained; in any case it is certain that the emphasis on the translation of the saint's relics to Rome is nothing but an invention of the martyrologist Ado. Probably the feast of 8 September has its origin in the commemoration that was made of the saint on that day, on the occasion of the litanic procession that set out from his church.

A. Pietro Frutaz