ADRIANO DI NICOMEDIA, SANTO, MARTIRE

ADRIAN of Nicomedia, St., Martyr. — According to the legendary *Passio*, ADRIAN would have been converted by the courageous attitude, during torture, of 23 Christians, victims of Diocletian’s persecution, and would have been put to death with them. His wife Natalia, present at the martyrdom, buried him in Byzantium. The Greeks venerate him on 26 August, while the *Martyrologium Hieronymianum* recalls him on 4 March. Pope Honorius (625–38) dedicated a church to him in the Roman Forum, adapting for this purpose the hall of the Senate Curia. This church, called *S. Hadriani in tribus fatis* (because of the nearby group of the three Fates), was established as a diaconia by Adrian I (772–95). A decree, attributed by the *Liber Pontificalis* (ed. L. Duchesne, I, p. 376) to Pope Sergius I (687–701), declares that the church of St. Adrian was to serve as the meeting point and starting place for the litanic procession on the feasts of the Blessed Virgin Mary: the *Itapante*, the Annunciation, the Assumption, and the Nativity. The memory of St. Adrian on 8 September, recorded in certain manuscripts of the *Martyrologium Hieronymianum*, in the Gregorian Sacramentary, and in the Gelasian Sacramentary of the 8th century, has not yet been explained; however, it is certain that the reference to the translation of the saint’s relics to Rome is nothing more than an invention of the martyrologist Ado. Probably the feast of 8 September originated from the commemoration of the saint on that day, on the occasion of the litanic procession that started from his church.