Processus and Martinian

The Holy Martyrs Processus and Martinian (in Latin Processus and Martinianus) were martyrs of Rome, greatly venerated there. The years in which they lived and the circumstances of their deaths are not known; all that is known is that they were buried in a cemetery of the apostolic age on the Via Aurelia, on 2 July, in the cemetery of Damasus at the second milestone of the road. According to the legend, they were soldiers of the Praetorian Guard, the warders of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul in the Mamertine Prison. The apostles converted them after a spring flowed miraculously in the prison, and Peter baptised them in its waters. By order of Nero they were arrested, tortured and beheaded. A faithful woman, Lucina, buried them in her own cemetery.

They were publicly venerated in Rome from the fourth, or perhaps the third, century; in the fourth century a church was built over their tomb, where Saint Gregory the Great preached a homily on their feast day, speaking of the presence of their bodies and of the cures of the sick. Pope Paschal I (817 to 824) moved their bones to a chapel in the old Basilica of Saint Peter; they still rest under the altar dedicated to them in the south transept of the present basilica, and in 1605 their relics were placed in a porphyry urn. They are commemorated on 2 July, as saints of the West before the Great Schism (saints of the undivided Church), by the New Calendar.