![]() Stephen, he suffered a violent death at the hands of a mob rather than give up the Sacred Body to “raging dogs.” His story became well known when Cardinal Wiseman made it a part of his novel Fabiola, in which the story of the young acolyte is dramatized and a very moving account given of his martyrdom and death. Damasus wrote a poem about this “boy-martyr of the Eucharist” and says that, like another St. Callistus, and his relics are claimed by the church of San Silvestro in Capite. The mangled body of Tarcisius was carried back to the catacombs, but the boy died on the way from his injuries. He went down under the blows, and it is believed that a fellow Christian drove off the mob and rescued the young acolyte. Somehow, he was also recognized as a Christian, and the small gang of boys, anxious to view the Christian “Mysteries,” became a mob and turned upon Tarcisius with fury. ![]() He was asked to join their games, but this time he refused and the crowd of boys noticed that he was carrying something. On the way, he was stopped by boys his own age who were not Christians but knew him as a playmate and lover of games. Tarcisius, an acolyte, was sent carrying the “Holy Mysteries” to those in prison. At one point, there was no deacon to send and so St. Each day, from a secret meeting place in the catacombs where Christians gathered for Mass, a deacon would be sent to the prisons to carry the Eucharist to those Christians condemned to die. ![]() “T arcisius was a twelve-year-old acolyte during one of the fierce Roman persecutions of the third century, probably during that of Valerian. The graphic depictions of brutality on the stained glass windows and on the stations of the cross led him to admit that he too would hate the sons of bitches who had done all of those terrible things to Jesus. ![]() In fact, the first time I remember thinking about it at all was on my wedding day when a Jewish friend who had apparently never been inside of an old-school blood and guts Catholic church was blown away by what he saw there. Having grown up in what comedian Jim Gaffigan might describe as a “Shiite” Irish Catholic family, and protected by 17 years of Catholic education (kindergarten through college), I was more or less immune to the ubiquitous and graphic gore surrounding almost everything in my Catholic world. There is an old saying that “ The fish are the last to discover the sea.” The meaning of this of course is that when we are completely surrounded by something it seems normal to the point of being invisible and we become oblivious to how it appears to outsiders. ![]()
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