The Lives of the Saints Volume 1 - St. Patrick's Basilica

joints to be thrown at the feet of those that were yet living. He
expired after his feet, hands, arms, legs, and thighs were cut off. The
tyrant, pointing to his mangled limbs and scattered bones, said to the
other three: "It concerns you to avoid this punishment; I do not compel
you to suffer." The martyrs answered with one voice: "On the contrary,
we rather pray that if you have any other more exquisite torment you
would inflict it on us. We are determined never to violate the fidelity
which we owe to God, or to deny Jesus Christ our Saviour, for he is our
God, from whom we have our being, and to whom alone we aspire." The
tyrant became almost distracted with fury, and commanded Diodorus to be
burned alive, Serapion to be beheaded, and Papias to be drowned. This
happened on the 25th of February; on which day the Roman and other
western Martyrologies name them; but the Greek Menæa, and the Menology
of the emperor Basil Porphyrogenitus, honor them on the 21st of January,
the day of their confession at Corinth.
{469}
ST. WALBURGE,[1] V. ABBESS.
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SHE was daughter to the holy king St. Richard, and sister to SS.
Willibald and Winebald; was born in the kingdom of the West-Saxons in
England, and educated in the monastery of Winburn in Dorsetshire, where
she took the religious veil. After having passed twenty-seven years in
this holy nunnery, she was sent by the abbess Tetta, under the conduct
of St. Lioba, with several others, into Germany, at the request of her
cousin, St. Boniface.[2] Her first settlement in that country was under
St. Lioba, in the monastery of Bischofsheim, in the diocese of Mentz.
Two years after she was appointed abbess of a nunnery founded by her two
brothers, at Heidenheim in Suabia, (now subject to the duke of
Wirtemberg,) where her brother, St. Winebald, took upon him at the same
time the government of an abbey of monks. This town is situated in the
diocese of Aichstadt, in Franconia, upon the borders of Bavaria, of
which St. Willibald, our saint's other brother, had been consecrated
bishop by St. Boniface. So eminent was the spirit of evangelical
charity, meekness, and piety, which all the words and actions of St.
Walburge breathed, and so remarkable was the fruit which her zeal and
example produced in others, that when St. Winebald died, in 760, she was
charged with a superintendency also over the abbey of monks till her
death. St. Willibald caused the remains of their brother Winebald to be
removed to Aichstadt, sixteen years after his death; at which ceremony
St. Walburge assisted. Two years after she passed herself to eternal
rest; on the 25th of February, in 779, having lived twenty-five years at
Heidenheim. Her relics were translated, in the year 870, to Aichstadt,
on the 21st of September, and the principal part still remains there in
the church anciently called of the Holy Cross, but since that time of