Daily Martyrology for April 2

In Caesarea in Palestine, in 306, Sts. Apphian and Theodosia, two students of Eusebius of Caesarea who were executed during the persecution of Diocletian.

In 1507, at Plessis-les-Tours in France, St. Francis of Paola. He spent his twelfth year in a Franciscan monastery, and a few years later became a hermit. Disciples gathered around him, and he organized them into “the hermits of Brother Francis of Assisi,” who were later called “Friars Minims”. The order embraced charity, penance and humility, and during Lent fasted from meat, eggs and dairy products. He encouraged devotion to the wounds of Christ and to Mary. At its apogee in the mid-sixteenth century, the order had 450 houses.

In 1672, on one of the Marianas Islands near Guam, Blessed Diego de San Vitores, martyr. A Jesuit, he worked as a missionary in Mexico and the Philippines before his request to evangelize the Marianas was granted. He was killed with a spear by an apostate Christian. Martyred with him was Blessed Peter Calungsod, a native Philippine catechist who was his assistant.

In 1967, in Venezuela, Blessed Mary of St. Joseph Alvarado Cardozo. She helped found a congregation of sisters to care for the sick, orphans and the elderly. The institute cared for the most downtrodden and promoted native Venezuelan vocations.

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Our daily martyrology was written by Fr. Hugh Feiss, OSB. Copyright © 2008 by the Monastery of the Ascension, Jerome, ID 83338.