Deacon Euplius

Saint Euplius, also known as Euplus or, in Italian, Sant'Euplio, was a deacon of the Christian community of Catania in Sicily who was put to death during the Great Persecution initiated by the emperor Diocletian. Nothing historically secure is known of his parentage, the date or place of his birth, or his life before the events that led to his arrest. The principal source is the Latin Passio or Acts of Saint Euplius, a text that, while not free of later rhetorical shaping, is often judged to rest on an early and relatively restrained account of a local martyrdom. According to this tradition, Euplius was found in Catania reading the Christian Gospels aloud. Imperial legislation of 303 had commanded the surrender and destruction of the sacred books and had forbidden Christian assembly; public reading of Scripture was therefore an act of open defiance as well as a pastoral ministry.

He was arrested and led before the consular governor of the province, whom the Acts name Calvisianus. Interrogated, Euplius declared that he was a Christian and that he would not give up the books of the Lord. He is described as still carrying or reciting the Gospel during the proceedings. The governor ordered him to be tortured. The narrative recounts that he was stretched on the rack and otherwise tormented in an effort to compel apostasy and the handing over of the scriptures. He persisted in his confession. After imprisonment and a further hearing he was sentenced to death. The Church’s liturgical tradition places his beheading at Catania on 12 August, a date commonly assigned to the year 304, in the later phase of the Diocletianic persecution. He is said to have gone to execution with prayer and with the sign of the cross, still associated with the Gospel book that had occasioned his arrest.

From an early period Euplius was honored as a martyr of Catania. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 12 August with an entry locating his passion in that city. A church of Saint Euplius stood in Catania, historically near the ancient amphitheatre; the building was damaged or destroyed in later disasters, including wartime bombing in the twentieth century, but the dedication preserved his memory in the urban landscape. He is venerated as a patron of Catania, alongside the more famous virgin martyr Saint Agatha, and as patron of the town of Trevico in Campania. Eastern Christian calendars also include him among the martyrs. In art he typically appears as a young deacon, often holding a book of the Gospels and the palm or sword of martyrdom.

Because he died in the age of the persecutions, there was no later process of beatification or papal canonization of the kind used in the second millennium; his sanctity is that of an ancient martyr whose cult the Church received. No contemporary document records a wife or children, nor membership in a monastic order: the sources know him only as a deacon. The year and place of his birth remain unknown, and prudent history does not invent them. What can be affirmed with reasonable confidence is the outline of a Sicilian deacon who, in the first years of the fourth century, was executed at Catania for refusing to abandon the Christian scriptures and the faith they expressed.