SIMON OF TRENT, Saint, Martyr. — A child of twenty months (according to others, two and a half years old), son of a tanner of Trent, who disappeared on the evening of Holy Thursday (23 March) 1475, and was found dead the following Sunday in a canal running beneath the house of one of the leading Jews of the city, bearing horrible mutilations.
Public opinion and the trial immediately opened by Prince-Bishop Giovanni Hinderbach attributed the murder to the Jews for ritual purposes. Fourteen of them were executed following the trial and depositions extracted under torture; the others, by a law that remained in force until secularization, were banished from the Principality. The little SIMON, whom the people of Trent soon venerated as a martyr, was granted liturgical cult and inscription in the Roman Martyrology by the Holy See only in 1588. Feast on 24 March.