About 560, at Nogent-sur-Seine, St. Cloud. A member of the Merovingian royal family, he became a hermit, and spent his time passing on the faith to the local people.
In 1619, in Hungary, Sts. Melchior Grodziecki and Stephen Pongracz, Jesuits, and Mark Crisinus a diocesan priest. They ministered to the Catholics in a predominantly Calvinist area of Slovakia. They were arrested, and when they would not renounce their Catholic faith, were tortured and killed.
In 1855, on Woodlark Island in the South Pacific, Blessed John Baptist Mazzucconi, a member of the Foreign Missionaries of Milan, who ministered in Papua New Guinea. He was murdered when the ship on which he was traveling landed on Woodlark Island. Just before this he had written to his family: “I don’t know what the Lord is preparing for me on this new journey beginning tomorrow: I just know one thing, that he is good and that he loves me greatly; everything else, calm and storm, danger and safety, life and earth are but passing and changeable expressions of his fervent, unchanging, eternal love.”
In 1921, at Parma, Blessed Anna Eugenia Picco. Her father was a musician who left her mother for another woman. Her mother then took a lover, and Anna grew up without much guidance. She eventually ran away from home and joined the Little Daughters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary at Parma. She became superior general and was a much beloved religious figure in Italy.
Our daily martyrology was written by Fr. Hugh Feiss, OSB. Copyright © 2008 by the Monastery of the Ascension, Jerome, ID 83338.
