Martyrs of Abitina

The Martyrs of Abitina, also called the Martyrs of Abitinae, were a group of forty-nine Christians belonging to the town of Abitina in the Roman province of Africa Proconsularis, in the region of present-day northern Tunisia. They were put to death in 304 during the Great Persecution under the emperor Diocletian. Beginning in 303, imperial edicts required the demolition of churches, the surrender of the sacred scriptures, and the prohibition of Christian assemblies for worship. Fundanus, the bishop of Abitina, complied and delivered the books of his church to the authorities. A large portion of the local community, however, would not give up the Sunday Eucharist and continued to meet in defiance of the law.

The congregation gathered in the house of the lector Emeritus, with the priest Saturninus presiding. Magistrates of Abitina broke up the assembly, arrested those present, and sent them under guard to Carthage, capital of the province, to be judged by the proconsul Gaius Annius Anullinus. The prisoners included Saturninus himself and several of his children: a younger Saturninus who was a lector, Felix, the consecrated virgin Mary, and the small child Hilarion. Also arrested were the senator Dativus, the lectors Emeritus and Ampelius, the virgin Victoria, and numerous other men and women of various ages. The ancient lists traditionally enumerate forty-nine martyrs in all.

During the hearing the accused freely admitted that they had come together to celebrate the liturgy of the Lord’s Day. When Anullinus asked Emeritus why he had allowed the meeting in his house, Emeritus answered that the people who entered were his brothers and that he could not refuse them. He then spoke the sentence that has remained the group’s most celebrated confession: "Sine dominico non possumus" ("We cannot exist without the Lord's Day"). Victoria testified that she had already bound herself to Christ by a vow of virginity. The child Hilarion, when threatened, declared that he too was a Christian. The proconsul ordered them to be tortured. Dativus and the priest Saturninus were placed on the rack and lacerated; others were scourged. After the torments they were taken back to prison.

The Acts of the Abitinian Martyrs, a fourth-century African passion narrative known as the Passio Sanctorum Dativi, Saturnini presbyteri et aliorum, record that the confessors died in prison from wounds, starvation, and the hardships of confinement. The text circulated in more than one recension and was later invoked in the Donatist controversy, because it denounced bishops who had been traditores, that is, who had handed over the scriptures. The Roman Martyrology enters the group on 12 February. Their public cult is of great antiquity and does not rest on a later papal canonization. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries popes and theologians have repeatedly cited Emeritus’s words as an early and forceful witness to the place of Sunday and the Eucharist at the heart of Christian life.