Saints Marius, Martha, Abachum and Audifax

Today a whole family is remembered: Marius, his wife Martha, and their two sons, Audifax and Abachum. What we know about them is very little and uncertain — it comes from the *Passio* of Saint Valentine, from the fourth century — but the story it tells is one that stays with you. Marius was a nobleman of Persian origin. In 270 he came to Rome with his whole family for a reason that seems strange today: to venerate the tombs of the martyrs. They were pilgrims. Except that, once there, they came face to face with something they couldn’t leave as it was: along the Via Salaria lay the bodies of more than two hundred sixty Christians, killed and left out in the open countryside. With the help of the priest John, they set about burying them. They were found out. They were questioned by the prefect Flavian and the governor Marcian, refused to renounce their faith and to sacrifice to the idols, and were sentenced to death: the men along the Via Cornelia, Martha by a pond not far away. A Roman matron named Felicitas buried them on her land, at the thirteenth milestone, where a church later rose that in the Middle Ages drew pilgrims and whose ruins still remain. Devotion to this family reached the nineteenth century in a curious way: an 1861 booklet, signed by Don Bosco but prepared by Count Carlo Cays, made it popular — the shrine of Saint Abachum in Caselette had something to do with it, and so did a friend who wanted to revive its cult. If your name is Mario or Martha, today is your name day, and in Italy they’re two names that have never stopped going around. A family that crosses half the world to pray and ends up burying strangers. They weren’t trying to become saints: they were just taking care of something no one was taking care of.