SARKANDER, JOHANN, Blessed. - Martyr of the seal of Confession, b. at Skotschau (on the borders of Austrian Silesia) on 20 Dec. 1576, d. in prison at Olmütz on 17 March 1620.
Having been ordained priest, he exercised his ministry in various places of the diocese of Olmütz, until in 1616 he was appointed parish priest at Holleschau in Moravia. There Baron Ladislaus Poppel of Lobkowitz had restored to the Catholics the churches taken from them by the Hussites, and to the Jesuits the meeting-house of the Bohemian Brethren. Sarkander, aided by the Fathers, revived and strengthened his flock, bringing about many conversions. The Thirty Years' War forced him in 1619 to take refuge in Poland to escape persecution by the Protestants; after a few months he returned to his parish and succeeded in persuading the Polish troops, who had come to the Emperor's aid, to spare the district. But this brought upon him the accusation of having himself summoned those foreign troops; accordingly he was arrested, taken to Olmütz, and tried by a commission of Hussites, who ordered him to reveal who had summoned the Poles, what he had done secretly in Poland, and what Lobkowitz, his penitent, had confessed to him. Sarkander denied having had anything to do with the coming of the foreign troops; but he refused to betray the seal of Confession. Neither the most horrible tortures inflicted on him, which after a month of agony brought him to the grave, could shake him. The people at once venerated him as a saint and sought his beatification. The process begun under Benedict XIV and interrupted was resumed under Pius IX, who proceeded to the solemn beatification on 6 May 1860. His relics are venerated in the cathedral of Olmütz.
CELESTINO TESTORE, Benedictine Spaniard, b. at Villafranca del Bierzo on 6 March 1695, d. at Madrid on 7 Dec. 1772.
He was the best disciple of P. Feijóo and one of his most ardent supporters. A severe critic of the evils of high society and oracle of the court of Philip II, he had cultural relations with Linnaeus and Muratori and left, unpublished, about a hundred treatises on almost all the sciences (especially botany, physics, pedagogy and sociology) and on literature. To S. is due the first history of literature in Spain (Memorias para la historia de la poesía y poetas españoles, posthumous ed., Madrid 1775).