ON ST. DOMNEO, MARTYR
AT BERGAMO IN INSUBRIA.
From the Bergamo Records.
CommentaryDomneo, Martyr, at Bergamo in Insubria (S.)
J. B. S.
John Antony Guarnerius, Canon, published a commentary in the year 1584 on the life and deeds of the Saints of Bergamo, from which Bolland, at V January, took the Acts, or rather the elogium, of Domno, nephew of this St. Domneo; inscribed in the Roman by Baronius, whence we too will set forth, woven in the same style, the things which pertain to ours, rather than from Ferrarius or others, since they too seem to have had no other source. There is also in Guarnerius Eusebia, the niece of St. Domneo, of whom it must be treated at XXIX October. The first, so far as I know, to insert St. Domneo (writing him Domnio) into the sacred Fasti was Galesinius, in these words: At Bergamo, of St. Domnio the martyr, who, converted to the faith of Christ by the zeal of the blessed martyr Alexander, expressing it before Maximian, the adversary of the name of Christ, through various torments with an ardent confession and a free voice, at last, giving his neck, confirmed it with his blood. But Baronius abridged these things better in the Roman thus: At Bergamo, of St. Domnio the martyr: which words are read in all the Plantin editions from the year 1586, so that I do not at all understand what Ferrarius means when in each Catalogue he observes that Domneo was formerly noted in the Roman Martyrology, under the name of Domnio, on the day VI of this month, or the day before the Nones, which I have nowhere found thus far. However that may be, let the authorities here alleged suffice for what we intend. Behold now the elogium of the praised Guarnerius.
[2] he is adorned with a brief elogium. Domneo of Bergamo, noble in his own house, at the time when Maximian Herculius was exercising an insatiable cruelty against the Christians, was himself passing his life at Bergamo in fastings, prayers, and the other offices of piety; and he burned with so great a zeal for the Christian religion that, when he inveighed the more bitterly against the worshipers of idols, he did not hesitate to reproach Maximian himself, through messengers, for his savagery and impiety in most grave and learned words. For which cause Maximian, inflamed with anger, sending ministers to Bergamo, ordered both the other Christians and especially Domneo to be beheaded. He is remembered to have taken up his severed head and carried it to a certain stone which was placed outside the church of St. Andrew, by which miracle very many were converted to God. His body was buried in the same church on the XVII Kalends of August in the year 306. Thus far Guarnerius, whose elogium, gathered after so many centuries from a rather obscure tradition, of how much account it is to be held, those skilled in these matters easily understand; so that it would be superfluous to add the ornaments of Galesinius or of others. What it is, that beheaded Martyrs carried their heads, has already been explained more than once elsewhere in such a way that to repeat it here again would be superfluous.