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Ss. Sabinus and Companions

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Saints and feasts

Ss. Sabinus and Companions

Bishop of Assisium, and His Companions, Martyrs

Sabinus and companions are honoured as martyrs in Umbria. Butler follows their traditional acts and also records Gregory the Great’s witness to the later honour paid to Sabinus’s relics.

Sources

The life below remains the existing Butler-based reading, with its edition citation. The profile preserves the feast date and source title already listed in the library. Additional personal dates and historical details are shown only when separately documented.

Companions named: Marcellus and Exuperantius
The traditional acts name these two deacons. The exact early episcopal see of Sabinus is not independently settled here.

Butler sourceAlban Butler, The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints, Volume XII (December), Thomas Richardson and Son, Derby, for the Catholic Book Society, 1846; December 30, “St Sabinus, Bishop of Assisium, and His Companions, Martyrs,” pp. 479-481.

Butler’s Lives of the Saints (1846)Alban Butler, The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints, Volume XII (December), Thomas Richardson and Son, Derby, for the Catholic Book Society, 1846; December 30, “St Sabinus, Bishop of Assisium, and His Companions, Martyrs,” pp. 479-481.

The reading

ⓘ Butler source

Alban Butler, The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints, Volume XII (December), Thomas Richardson and Son, Derby, for the Catholic Book Society, 1846; December 30, “St Sabinus, Bishop of Assisium, and His Companions, Martyrs,” pp. 479-481.

Butler’s traditional account presents Sabinus as a bishop arrested with members of his clergy during the persecution of Diocletian and Maximian. The notice connects the events with Assisi and Spoleto. Among the companions it names are the deacons Marcellus and Exuperantius.

They refused to abandon their Christian confession and suffered severe punishments. The acts describe the deaths of the deacons and the later killing of Sabinus at Spoleto. They also contain accounts of healing and conversion, which remain identified here as part of that older narrative.

Butler adds a witness from Gregory the Great concerning relics of Sabinus placed in a chapel near Fermo. The martyrs’ remembrance also appears in the calendars he cites. This reading distinguishes that continuing veneration from an unqualified acceptance of every detail of the trial story or the precise early episcopal chronology.

Historical note

An original Novena Regina reading adapted and summarized from the cited pre-1962 source. This is not a transcription of Butler’s words.

The source’s traditional title calls Sabinus bishop of Assisi and places his death at Spoleto. The reading does not independently settle his exact episcopal see or every episode in the acts.

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