Today’s optional memorial honors St. Marcellinus and St. Peter, two Roman martyrs executed during the Diocletian persecution around 304 AD. One was a priest, the other an exorcist. They were beheaded together in a forest clearing called the Black Wood, their names preserved in the oldest lists of Roman martyrs and in the Canon of the Mass itself.
Who Marcellinus and Peter were
Marcellinus served as a priest in Rome during the final years of Diocletian’s reign, when the Empire launched its most systematic attempt to eliminate Christianity. Peter was an exorcist, one of the minor orders in the early Church responsible for casting out demons and preparing catechumens for baptism. They likely knew each other through the Roman clergy’s tight network of safe houses and secret liturgies.
According to the earliest accounts, they were imprisoned together. While in chains, they converted their jailer Artemius and his family. Pope Damasus I, writing decades later, recorded that the executioners forced them to dig their own graves in a remote forest so that Christians wouldn’t find their bodies and venerate them as martyrs. The plan failed. A Christian woman named Lucilla followed at a distance, marked the spot, and recovered their remains.
What they’re known for
Their cult spread quickly through Rome. By the time Constantine legalized Christianity twenty years after their deaths, pilgrims were visiting their tomb on the Via Labicana. Pope Damasus composed an epitaph for their burial site. Constantine himself built a basilica over their grave, later choosing to be buried nearby in what became the Church of Saints Marcellinus and Peter.
They appear holding palms of martyrdom and the sword of their execution. Marcellinus wears priest’s vestments; Peter carries the exorcist’s stole. The iconography captures what mattered most about them: not spectacular miracles or theological writings, but the plain fact that a priest and an exorcist kept doing their work under threat of death, right up until the sword fell.
For today
If you face a situation today where doing the right thing puts you at risk—even small risk, even just awkwardness or pushback—remember that Marcellinus and Peter had the same choice on a lethal scale. They chose to keep being who they were called to be. You can ask their intercession for courage in small acts of integrity: the honest conversation, the unpopular stand, the thing you know you should do but fear the cost of.
Say their names once before you do it.
