Faithfulness to Christ when it cost everything.
March 26
March 26 (also listed: March 27, December 18)
Martyr
Thin entry · the 1897 book gives only 75 words. We have not filled the gap with invented detail.
Saint Castulus, chamberlain of the palace to Diocletian, was wont to receive Christians into his house, and screen them from the pursuit of the magistrates. He was denounced to Fabian, the prefect of the city, who, after having tortured him in many ways, had him cast into a pit and buried in sand. He was betrayed by a renegade Christian named Torquatus, the same whom Cardinal Wiseman has introduced into his historical sketch of "Fabiola."
Stay faithful when it costs you. This account is about holding firm under pressure.
Learn from the kind of life it was. Faithfulness to Christ when it cost everything.
Saint Castulus, chamberlain of the palace to Diocletian [Roman emperor 284–305, who began the ‘Great Persecution’ of Christians in 303], was wont to receive Christians into his house, and screen them from the pursuit of the magistrates. He was denounced to Fabian, the prefect of the city, who, after having tortured him in many ways, had him cast into a pit and buried in sand. He was betrayed by a renegade Christian named Torquatus, the same whom Cardinal Wiseman has introduced into his historical sketch of "Fabiola."
Feast: March 26
One short email a day for nine days. The day's prayer, a line from St. Castulus's story, and a nudge to keep going.
Image: Moosburg Kastulus Ursulakapelle.jpg · selbst fotografiert · Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
From Sabine Baring-Gould, The Lives of the Saints, new edition in 16 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1897), digitized text from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
Image: selbst fotografiert, Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
From Sabine Baring-Gould, The Lives of the Saints, new edition in 16 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1897), digitized text from Project Gutenberg. 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.