St. Ambrose relates that Agricola was a gentleman of Bologna and that his slave Vitalis learned the faith from him and was martyred first.
Read the essentials →St. Ambrose relates that Agricola was a gentleman of Bologna and that his slave Vitalis learned the faith from him and was martyred first.
November 9
November 4
Martyrs
St. Ambrose relates that Agricola was a gentleman of Bologna and that his slave Vitalis learned the faith from him and was martyred first. Vitalis praised God as long as he could speak, then prayed Christ to receive his soul.
Agricola was then nailed to a cross. In 393 St. Ambrose found their relics in the Jewish burial ground at Bologna, together with the nails and cross of Agricola's martyrdom. Butler places their arrest probably in 304; Baring-Gould gives the fourth century.
Thin entry · the 1897 book gives only 0 words. We have not filled the gap with invented detail.
Keep their day. Remember them on November 9 with a short prayer, and ask for their help.
Feast: November 4
Traditional: November 9
One short email a day for nine days. The day's prayer, a line from Sts. Vitalis and Agricola's story, and a nudge to keep going.
Image: Saints Vitalis and Agricola.jpg · Petr Vodička · CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
From Sabine Baring-Gould, The Lives of the Saints, new edition in 16 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1897–98); text from the Internet Archive scan (OCR, lightly cleaned; errors possible). Public domain.
Image: Petr Vodička, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
From Sabine Baring-Gould, The Lives of the Saints, new edition in 16 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1897–98); text from the Internet Archive scan (OCR, lightly cleaned; errors possible). Public domain in the United States. Reproduced unedited, except for short bracketed notes in grey that we added to explain names and terms (“S.” is the old abbreviation for Saint). Some history and judgments reflect 19th-century scholarship.
