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Home  »  Volume V: May  »  St. Pancras, Martyr

Rev. Alban Butler (1711–73). Volume V: May. The Lives of the Saints. 1866.

May 12

St. Pancras, Martyr

 
HE is said to have suffered at Rome in the fourteenth year of his age. Having been beheaded for the faith, which he had gloriously confessed under Dioclesian in the year 304, he was interred in the cemetery of Calepodius, which afterward took his name. His old church in that place was repaired in the fifth century by Pope Symmachus, and in the seventh by Pope Honorius I. St. Gregory the Great speaks of his relics. St. Gregory of Tours 1 calls him the Avenger of Perjuries, and says that God by a perpetual miracle visibly punished false oaths made before his relics. Pope Vitalian sent a portion of them to King Oswi in 656. 2 Italy, England, France, Spain, &c., abound with churches which bear his name. 3 See D. Jenichen, Diss. de S. Pancratio, urbis et ecclesiæ primariæ Giessensis patrono titulari, in 4to. anno 1758, at Giessen, an university in Upper Hesse, belonging to the landgrave of Hesse Darmstadt.  1
 
Note 1. L. 1, de Glor. Mart. c. 39. [back]
Note 2. Bede, Hist. b. 3, c. 29. [back]
Note 3. Henschenius, t. 3, Maij. p. 18. [back]