“Eleven months after, Novatus[11] died in his turn. He bequeathed all his goods to Praxedis, and she then begged of St. Pius to erect a Church in the baths of Novatus, which were no longer used and where there was a large and spacious hall. The Bishop made the dedication in the name of the blessed virgin Praxedis herself, and in the same place he consecrated a baptistery.
“But at the end of two years a great persecution was declared against the Christians, and many received the crown of martyrdom. Praxedis concealed a great number of them in her oratory and nourished them with the food of this world and the Word of God. But the Emperor Antoninus, having learnt that these meetings took place in the oratory of Praxedis, caused it to be searched, and many Christians were taken, especially the Priest Simetrius and twenty-two others, and the blessed Praxedis collected their bodies by night, and buried them in the cemetery of Priscilla on the seventh day of the Kalends of June. Then the virgin of the Saviour, worn out with sorrow, only asked for death. Her tears and her prayers reached to Heaven, and fifty-four days after her brethren had suffered she passed to God. And I, Pastor the Priest, have buried her body near that of her father, Pudens.”[12]
There is nothing that could be added to the Priest Pastor’s story. It is so complete, so loving, and so illuminating in the gentle charity with which it tells us that “Pudentiana passed to God.” Not a word of her cruel death—we know of that from other sources, no complaints about the rampant hatred which made it necessary to conceal her body for four weeks before it could be laid beside that of her father in the holy ground of the Appian Way. All is told without a spark of rancour or an exclamation of grief—yet when Pastor buried Praxedis beside her sister, the loving circle to which he had ministered in their house was broken up, every member of the family was dead, as well as most of the friends they gathered there; the home had been raided and desecrated, and he was a marked man, holding himself in readiness for his end.
What strikes one particularly in all the stories of this time is the resolute veneration with which the Christians, in spite of all prohibitions, collected the bodies of their slain comrades and succeeded in burying them in holy ground. The bodies of Pudentiana and Praxedis were finally restored to their home, already consecrated as a church, and there we can behold at this day the phials in which they gathered up the blood of the martyrs. It was the zeal of the valiant Pudentiana in this work of love which drew down upon her the wrath of the persecutors and hastened her own death. A hundred years later the noble Cecilia, with her husband and his brother, suffered for the same cause, and what thousands had been immolated for it between! Nothing could daunt the Christian spirit in this regard, and it cannot but enhance the preciousness of our holy relics to reflect that so many of our forbears in the Faith preserved them for us at the price of their own lives.