Rufina and Secunda

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For the Spanish martyr named Rufina, see Justa and Rufina.
For other uses of Rufina, see Rufina.
Saints Rufina and Secunda
The Martyrdom of Saints Secunda and Rufina. Collaborative painting by Il Morazzone, Giulio Cesare Procaccini, and Giovanni Battista Crespi (1620-1625)
Died 257 AD
Venerated in Roman Catholic Church
Feast July 10
Attributes two maidens floating in the Tiber River with weights attached to their necks.
Saints Portal

Saints Rufina and Secunda (Italian: Santa Ruf(f)ina e Santa Seconda) (d. 257 AD) were Roman martyrs and Christian saints. Their feast day is July 10.

Contents

[edit] Legend

According to the legendary Acts, they suffered in 257 during the persecution of Valerian. Their legend states that they were daughters of a Roman senator named Asterius. Their fiances, Armentarius and Verinus, were Christians, but renounced their faith when Valerian began his persecutions.

Escaping to Etruria, Rufina and Secunda were captured and brought before a prefect, who tortured and then beheaded them.

Their bodies were buried on the Via Aurelia and the church of Sante Rufina e Secunda was built in their honor in Rome.

[edit] Historicity

In the notes attached to the publication of Pope Paul VI's revision of the Roman Catholic calendar of saints, it is stated that of these two saints, whose feast was inserted into the Roman Calendar in the twelfth century on the occasion of the transfer of their relics to the Lateran Basilica, nothing is really known except their names and the fact that they were buried at the ninth milestone of the Via Cornelia.[1]

They are mentioned in the Berne manuscript of the Martyrologium Hieronymianum, and are recorded also in seventh-century Itineraries as on the Via Cornelia, where Pope Damasus I erected a church over their grave. The town on this spot named after St. Rufina (Santa Rufina) became the see of one of the suburbicarian dioceses that was later united with Porto as Porto-Santa Rufina.

[edit] In art

Rufina and Secunda are sometimes depicted as two maidens floating in the Tiber River with weights attached to their necks.

In the 1620s, The painters Il Morazzone, Giulio Cesare Procaccini, and Giovanni Battista Crespi collaborated on the Martyrdom of Saints Rufina and Secunda, which was praised as il quadro delle tre mani ("the painting by three hands").[2]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Calendarium Romanum (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1969), p. 129
  2. ^ Venice and Northern Italy, 1600–1800 A.D.

[edit] External links

This article incorporates text from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913.