VOICES OF THE FATHERS 01 - Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs

I was recently going through some old books and found a slim volume entitled The Osterley Selection from the Latin Fathers, edited by Joseph Crehan of Heythrop College, was compiled chiefly for seminarians, especially late vocations, at Campion College, Osterley, a Jesuit formation house in the Archdiocese of Westminster that closed in 2004. The 1949 preface praises the great classical authors—Caesar, Cicero, Livy, Virgil—yet insists that Christian writing shows a different kind of beauty. Pagans, it says, wrote with studied grace; Christians with passionate conviction. The volume includes selections from Ambrose and Augustine, Tertullian, Vincent of Lérins, Jerome, and others. It occurred to me that I might offer a podcast of the first reading and see how it goes. Some of you get Patristic readings in the office of readings in the Liturgy of the Hours but do you hear them? That’s another question. There are 42 brief readings in the book by authors whom you will more than likely recognize. I propose to read an English translation, make some comments and read the Latin. The is the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs (Acta Martyrum Scillitanorum), a brief but exceptionally important document from the late second century. It records the interrogation, sentencing, and execution of a small group of Christians from Scillium in Roman North Africa, tried at Carthage before the proconsul Saturninus in A.D. 180.