Pudentiana

The Holy Martyr Pudentiana was a Christian virgin of Rome, in the second century, the eldest daughter of the senator Pudens and sister of Saint Praxedes. Her feast is on 19 May.

According to her acts and the Martyrology of Reichenau, she was a Roman virgin of the early Church, daughter of Saint Pudens, friend of the apostles. With her sister Praxedes and Pope Pius I she built a baptistery in the church in her father's house, on the Esquiline hill, and began to baptise pagans. There too they sheltered persecuted Christians and buried the bodies of the martyrs. Pudentiana died young, at about sixteen, perhaps as a martyr, and was buried beside her father (and later her sister) in the catacomb of Priscilla on the Via Salaria. There is evidence for Pudens, but not directly for Pudentiana or Praxedes; it is thought that the ecclesia Pudentiana, the church of Pudens, came to be taken for Saint Pudentiana. In the ninth century her relics were moved, with the bodies of 2,300 other saints, by Pope Paschal I to the church of Santa Prassede.

The basilica of Santa Pudenziana on the Esquiline bears her name, and the saint's image is seen in the apse mosaic (fifth century) and in the mosaics of Santa Prassede (ninth century). Her day was in the Roman calendar, on 19 May, until the revision of 1969; the Roman Martyrology still mentions her. The Spanish conquistador Miguel López de Legazpi, founder of the city of Manila, took possession of that territory on 19 May 1571, the feast of Saint Pudentiana (in Spanish Potenciana), and declared her patroness. By the apostolic letter of 12 September 1942, Pope Pius XII, at the request of the Philippine bishops, named her a secondary patroness of the Philippines, with Saint Rose of Lima.