ON ST. BASSIAN OF SYRACUSE, MARTYR, IN SICILY,
PERHAPS IN THE YEAR 269.
SYLLOGE.
Bassian, martyr, at Syracuse in Sicily. (S.)
St. Bassian, venerated at Syracuse, Ferrarius, alone among the martyrologists, recalls the memory of St. Basian on the present day in his General Catalogue of the Saints who are not in the Roman Martyrology, using these words: At Syracuse in Sicily, St. Bassian, Martyr, under the emperor Claudius, who held the empire from the year 268. Nor does the Order for reciting the divine Office, printed in the year 1840 for the use of the Sicilian Fathers of the Society of Jesus, disagree; in it, at the 16th day of October, for the diocese of Syracuse, one may read: the feast of St. Bassian, to be celebrated under the semidouble rite. The Office is the common of one Martyr not a Pontiff, the Mass Lætabitur, with the Gospel from the Mass Sacerdotes Dei. And hence all doubt about his cult and about the martyrdom he endured is removed. Wherefore the Sicilian writers have rightly distinguished this Saint from another St. Bassian, a citizen of Syracuse and bishop of Lodi in Italy, whose Life Bolland illustrated at the 19th day of January, placing him on the basis of sure records among the Confessors, by no means among the Martyrs. There are also other Saints who bear the name Bassian; yet no one who bears in mind the place of cult and of martyrdom will easily confuse them with St. Bassian, the Syracusan Martyr.
[2] having obtained companions about whom nothing is established, Thomas de Angelo, a priest of the family of St. Dominic, in his Historico-critical Annals of the Sicilian Church Page 87. brings forward Ottavio Gaetani, who in his Lives of the Sicilian Saints joins to St. Bassian Saints Fabian and Sabinian, and affirms that the three are praised by Raffaele of Volterra in his Anthropology and by Leandro in his Description of Sicily. How correct this is I cannot investigate, since I regret that all three of these writings are lacking to me. It must be noted, however, that Saints Fabian and Sabinian had at one time become so obscure to Gaetani himself that in his Isagoge to Sicilian History, chapter XXVI, number 11 Burmann's Collection of the Writers of Sicily, volume II, column 117., he wrote: After the times of Decius, and of Valerian and Gallienus, Sicily was afflicted with new disasters under the rule of Claudius; by whose edicts very many were tortured and slaughtered, but almost all remained in obscurity: ONE, Bassian, has been rescued from oblivion, who by his constancy adorned religion, and by his blood Syracuse. And this Gaetani wrote after his History of the Lives of the Sicilian Saints, which Thomas de Angelo cites, had already been printed. Neither of these Saints, therefore, seemed fit to be added in the title to the Martyr Bassian, about whose cult alone we have certain knowledge.
[3] he suffered martyrdom about the year 269. The Sicilian writers, as many as it has been possible to read, agree in assigning the passion of St. Bassian to the times of the emperor Claudius: it will be enough to have reviewed Rocco Pirri in his Sicilia sacra, on the church of Syracuse, number IX, § IV Ibid., volume II, column 574., Ottavio Gaetani in the Isagoge, and Thomas de Angelo and Ferrarius in the works and places cited. Pirri, from the Syracusan records, from Gaetani, Leandro, and Alberto Piccolo, determines that the year 270 was adorned by that martyrdom. But since the 16th day of October must be considered the day of St. Bassian's death, and the emperor Marcus Aurelius Flavius Claudius, surnamed Gothicus, according to the common chronology met his death at Sirmium about five months before, it is preferable to leave the time of our Martyr's contest somewhat indefinite for a while; although that emperor held the empire for scarcely three years, and, as Thomas de Angelo rightly notes, was chiefly occupied in waging war in the first period of his reign. And hence neither may we altogether side with Thomas, who refers the calamity of the Syracusan Church under Claudius to the pontificate of St. Felix, Pope I; since, according to the reckoning of our Papebroch, who reviews the catalogues of the Supreme Pontiffs in the Propylæum of May Page 38., St. Felix ascended the chair of Peter on the 1st day of January of the year 270; nor is Ferrarius to be listened to when he writes in the annotations to the Catalogue of the Saints that St. Bassian suffered at the time when St. Maximus presided over the Church of Syracuse. But Rocco Pirri, in the cited account of the Syracusan Church, not only puts Eutychius in the place of this Maximus, but is entirely ignorant of this St. Maximus proposed by Ferrarius. More that is certain or probable about this Saint we have been unable to attain.