“MENNNAS was a Christian Egyptian soldier who had withdrawn himself into a desert place to do penance, but one day, during the persecution under the Emperors Diocletian and Maximian, upon the said Emperors’ birthday, when the people were gathered together at a great show, stood forth in the theatre, and reviled with a loud voice the idolatries of the Gentiles. Thereupon he was arrested, and being bound at Cotyasus, the chief city of Phrygia, under the authority of the President Pyrrhus, was first savagely lashed with thongs, then racked, then scarified with fire applied to his naked body, then had his wounds lacerated by rubbing with hair-cloth, then dragged through thorns and iron spikes with hands and feet tied, then lashed again with whips loaded with lead, and lastly slain with the sword, and thrown into a fire. The Christians saved his body thence and buried it, and it hath in after times been carried to Constantinople.”
St. Mennas was an officer in the imperial army of Rome. He was rudely booted from the general calendar of saints in the 1960s, along with many other holy martyrs. If only this warrior saint had known that “proselytism,” as Jorge Bergoglio said, “is solemn nonsense!” He might have chosen dialogue instead of the combative and extremist measure of “revil[ing] in a loud voice,” and then prevented these unpleasant experiences for himself. Pray for us, St. Mennas, and for all those who implicitly argue that your martyrdom was in vain.
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