A Rogation Reflection for the Feast of Ss. Nereus, Achilleus, Domitilla, and Pancras
The Roman Church, in her wisdom, weaves together on this twelfth day of May a tapestry of meaning whose threads are not easily separated. We stand within the Minor Rogations — those three days of supplication preceding the Ascension when the faithful, after the ancient pattern of St. Mamertus of Vienne, beat the bounds of the parish in litany and tears, asking the Lord of the harvest both for the fruits of the earth and for the deeper fruits of penitence. At the same time, we keep the memory of four illustrious martyrs whose blood once watered the soil of Rome: the soldier-saints Nereus and Achilleus, the noble virgin Flavia Domitilla, and the boy Pancras, who at fourteen years of age confessed Christ before the Caesars.
Two passages of Scripture preside over this day’s meditation: a vision from the Book of Wisdom that pierces the veil of time, and a Gospel scene from Cana where a desperate father learns to believe.
I. The Great Reversal
“Then shall the just stand with great constancy against those that have afflicted them, and taken away their labours.” (Wisdom 5:1, D.R.)
So opens the dramatic passage which the Church has long appointed to the feasts of the martyrs in her Mass and Office. The wicked, who in their day mocked the lives of the just as madness and their deaths as ignominy, behold them at last enrolled among the children of God — and their lot reckoned among the saints.
The Fathers received this passage as a kind of prophetic photograph of the Last Day. St. Cyprian of Carthage, who himself perished in the proconsul’s sword in the year 258, draws repeatedly upon Wisdom 5 in his exhortations to the persecuted Church. In his treatise De Mortalitate, written during the plague that ravaged North Africa, he places this great reversal before the eyes of trembling Christians: the body may waste, the world may rage, but the just shall stand in magna constantia — with great constancy — at the very judgment seat of God. The martyrs especially, having drunk the cup of which their Master drank, shall be the first to vindicate the apparent folly of the Cross.
St. Augustine, in his Enarrations on the Psalms, meditates upon the same dynamic. The wicked, he observes, do not merely err in their estimation of the just; they wound their own souls with the spectacle of mockery. When the veil falls away at the end, the laughter dies upon their lips, and they find that the men whom they accounted fools were the only wise ones among them. This is the great irony that the martyrs preach by their blood: that the wisdom of the world is foolishness, and that the despised life of self-renunciation, virginity, chastity, and confession is the only life that endures.
Behold, then, the four whom we honor. Nereus and Achilleus, who according to ancient tradition had served as imperial guardsmen until the truth of Christ disarmed them of pagan weapons. Domitilla, of the very imperial house, who chose the lily of virginity over the diadem of marriage. And the boy Pancras, who at an age when most are still reckoning their childhood pleasures was reckoned worthy to confess Christ unto death. The world saw their lives as madness — a soldier laying down his sword, a princess refusing her station, a child refusing his life. The world sees thus still. Wisdom answers: “Behold how they are numbered among the children of God.”
II. The Faith of the Regulus
If the lesson from Wisdom shows us the end of the journey, the Holy Gospel of this Rogation Tuesday shows us its beginning. There came to Our Lord at Cana of Galilee a certain regulus, a royal official, whose son lay dying at Capharnaum. He had heard, perhaps, of the wedding miracle once worked here; he came now to beg another. And the Lord, who reads the inmost movements of the heart, said to him a word at once severe and merciful:
“Unless you see signs and wonders, you believe not.” (John 4:48, D.R.)
St. John Chrysostom, in his homily upon this passage, marvels at the exchange. The man, he observes, had come with a faith still bound to the senses — believing that Christ must descend bodily, must touch and look upon the sick child, in order to bring about a cure. He had not yet ascended to the higher faith that knows the Word of Christ is itself almighty, needing neither distance nor delay. The Lord, refusing to descend physically with him, descends spiritually into his soul, and demands a faith that does not lean upon spectacle.
St. Augustine, in his Tractates on the Gospel of John, notes the gentle ascent of the man’s belief. First, he believes enough to ask. Then, hearing the simple word — Vade, filius tuus vivit, “Go thy way; thy son liveth” — he believes enough to depart in peace, before any confirmation has been given him. Lastly, when the servants meet him on the road with the news of the healing at the seventh hour, the very hour the Word was spoken, he and his whole house come to perfect faith. Augustine sees in this gradation a parable of every Christian soul: we begin in weakness, asking signs; we are led on by the bare Word; we discover at length that the Word was working in us all along, and our whole household — that is, every faculty of our nature — is gathered into belief.
It is no accident that the Church appoints this Gospel for the Rogation days. These are days when the faithful, like the regulus, come down to the Lord with petitions for life — for the life of the fields, of the household, of the body, of the soul. And the Lord answers many such petitions, not by descending visibly into our affairs, but by speaking a hidden word that begins to work at once in the depths of things. The grace is given; the fever begins to leave at the seventh hour; only afterward do we discover that He had heard us from the first.
III. The Martyrs as the Regulus Perfected
Here the two readings meet. The regulus’s son was healed of a bodily fever; the martyrs were given a yet greater healing — they were healed, as St. Cyprian would say, of the long fever of this present life from which the saints are at last released. The regulus believed, and his whole house with him; the martyrs believed unto blood, and brought whole households, indeed whole cities, to the faith. Pancras’s witness drew others after him; Domitilla’s chastity strengthened her servants Nereus and Achilleus, or perhaps it was their preaching that fortified hers — the ancient tradition reads both ways, and either reading honors all three.
St. Gregory the Great, who in the closing years of the sixth century preached one of his celebrated homilies on the Gospels in the very basilica that stands above the tomb of Nereus and Achilleus, exhorted his Roman flock to look upon the relics beneath their feet and consider what manner of life had been buried there. These saints, he taught in substance, scorned the world when the world was still flourishing and beautiful; we cannot bring ourselves to scorn it even now that its glamour has so visibly faded. The world that the martyrs renounced was a world at the height of its imperial splendor; the world we are bidden to renounce lies already half in ruins. Their constancy rebukes our reluctance.
IV. The Rogation Application
What, then, shall we draw from these meditations for the days that remain before the Ascension?
First, let us learn the constancy of the just. The Litanies of the Saints which we chant in procession on these days are not mere recitations; they are an enlistment of the very company described in Wisdom 5 — they are numbered among the children of God. To call upon Ss. Nereus, Achilleus, Domitilla, and Pancras is to ask that something of their magna constantia descend upon us, that we be made willing to be accounted fools by the world for the sake of Christ.
Second, let us learn the regulus’s faith. Many of us pray for relief — bodily, familial, professional, spiritual — and grow weary because we do not see the Lord descending visibly into the house. The Gospel teaches that He works most often by a hidden Word, healing at the seventh hour while we are still upon the road. Pray, then, and depart in peace, and trust that the Word has gone forth.
Third, let us permit Him to heal the whole house. The regulus’s faith was not solitary; credidit ipse et domus eius tota. So too our own conversion of life ought to draw with it our spouse, our children, our friends, those over whom God has given us any measure of influence. The Rogation days are eminently domestic — they belong to households no less than to parishes — and the example of the martyrs reminds us that whole households can be sanctified together.
A Closing Prayer
May Ss. Nereus and Achilleus, who exchanged the warfare of Caesar for the militia of Christ; may St. Flavia Domitilla, who chose the spouse of her soul above the spouse of her station; and may St. Pancras, the youthful confessor — pray for us in these Rogation days, that we may believe as the regulus believed, stand as the just shall stand, and be found at last, as they are, numbered among the children of God.
Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.
If this reflection has stirred your devotion to the witnesses of the early Church, the Lives of the Saints learning path will guide you more deeply into the company of those who have gone before us — their virtues, their sufferings, and the lessons their lives bequeath to ours. Alternatively, the Sacred Liturgy path treats more fully the place of the Rogation days within the traditional calendar.