Peregrinus, Bishop of Terni

Peregrinus, known in Italian as Pellegrino, is commemorated as an early bishop of Terni, the ancient Umbrian city of Interamna Nahars, and is venerated as a saint of the Catholic Church. Almost nothing about him can be established from contemporary documents. No inscription, chronicle, or papal letter of the second or third century names him. What later ages recorded comes from a passio of uncertain and probably late date, from local Umbrian tradition, and from the Roman Martyrology, which on 16 May notes at Interamna “Saint Peregrinus, bishop.” Later writers often add that he was a martyr. Conventional catalogues sometimes give the year 138 as the date of his death, but that figure is traditional rather than independently attested, and it conflicts with another strand of the same legend that places his passion in the persecutions of Marcus Aurelius, who reigned from 161 to 180. A careful account must therefore treat the second-century dating as pious convention, not as verified chronology.

The legendary passio describes Peregrinus as a hermit of Spanish origin who, after a life of solitude, was chosen bishop of Terni and was later put to death in a Roman persecution. Other, equally unverified notices have made him a Roman of noble family, converted and baptized in the time of Pope Sixtus I in the early second century, and then called to the Umbrian see. These stories cannot be reconciled in detail and should be read as hagiographical narrative rather than as history. In the second century any Christian community at Interamna would have been small and poorly documented. The city’s later ecclesiastical memory is more securely attached to Saint Valentine, remembered as a bishop of Terni in the third century, and to other local martyrs. Whether Peregrinus was a distinct historical bishop, a name preserved from an early liturgical list, or in some way doubled with another Umbrian saint is a question the surviving sources do not settle.

His cult remained essentially local. He is named as a patron saint of Terni, sharing the city’s religious landscape with Valentine and other Umbrian holy figures. The liturgical feast on 16 May is the principal commemoration and is the one point on which martyrologies agree. There is no record of a formal papal canonization; like most saints of the first Christian centuries he was recognized by popular and episcopal cult, the process later termed pre-congregation canonization. The place of his burial is not established by trustworthy evidence, and no writings are attributed to him. In the wider calendar he must be distinguished from Peregrinus of Auxerre, an early missionary bishop in Gaul, from various medieval hermits and pilgrims called Pellegrino, and from Saint Peregrine Laziosi of Forlì (thirteenth–fourteenth century), the Servite friar who became the popular patron of those suffering from cancer. Confusion among these figures is common in older reference works and in popular devotion.

Because the dossier is so thin, a historically cautious biography can only underline both the persistence of his name in the liturgy of Terni and the limits of what can be known. He stands as a representative of the obscure episcopal saints of central Italy whose memory the Church retained even when the circumstances of their lives had faded. Modern scholarship does not reconstruct a detailed life; it notes the martyrological entry, the local patronage, the legendary Spanish-hermit and Roman-noble variants, and the traditional but insecure second-century setting, and it leaves the rest blank.