Justus and Pastor

Saints Justus and Pastor were two schoolboy brothers, Justus thirteen years old and Pastor less than nine, killed for their faith in the Diocletian persecution, around 304, at Alcalá de Henares (ancient Complutum) in Spain. They are mentioned by the Christian poet Prudentius.

After the imperial proclamation was made public at Complutum, the two boys, who were at school, threw down the tablets they used for writing, moved by their desire to give their lives for Christ, and ran to the residence of Dacianus to bear witness to their faith despite their young age. They confessed to him that they were Christians and refused to sacrifice to idols. They were viciously flogged for denouncing the Roman religion and later beheaded in a place recorded in local tradition as the Campus Laudabilis, outside the city, on the site of present-⁠day Alcalá de Henares.

Relics believed to be theirs were discovered in the eighth century and taken to Huesca; in 1568 they were brought back to Alcalá de Henares and interred beneath the high altar of the Cathedral of Saints Justus and Pastor (familiarly the "Cathedral of the Holy Children"), built between 1497 and 1514. Churches are dedicated to them also at Barcelona and Narbonne. They are patrons of Alcalá de Henares. They are commemorated on 6 August as saints of the undivided Church, by the New Calendar.