A Roman husband and father martyred near Tivoli around the year 120, remembered in the same ancient tradition as his wife Symphorosa and their seven sons.

Saint Getulius was a layman, by tradition a former Roman soldier, martyred near the town of Gabii outside Rome around the year 120. He is remembered as the husband of Saint Sinforosa (Symphorosa) of Tivoli and the father of seven sons — Crescens, Julian, Nemesius, Primitivus, Justin, Stacteus, and Eugene — whose own martyrdom under the emperor Hadrian is one of the more fully developed family martyr legends of the early Roman Church.

Quick Facts

• Died: c. 120, Gabii, Italy
• Venerated as: Layperson and martyr

Who Was Saint Getulius?

According to the ancient tradition preserved in the Roman Martyrology, Getulius died some years before his wife and sons, who were martyred together at Tivoli during Hadrian’s reign after refusing to sacrifice at the emperor’s temple; the family’s story became one of the most widely retold martyr narratives of the region around Rome. Getulius himself is remembered chiefly as the head of this family whose fidelity to Christ, in the tradition, spanned two generations.

Historical Setting

The early second century, well before the more systematic persecutions of the third and fourth centuries, still saw sporadic local action against Christians, often triggered by refusal to participate in civic or imperial religious rites; the region around Tivoli and Gabii, close to Rome itself, was directly exposed to this kind of enforcement under Hadrian’s administration.

Why the Church Remembers Saint Getulius

Getulius is remembered as the father of a family whose collective martyrdom became a lasting symbol of fidelity passed from one generation to the next, an image the Roman Church kept alive through the joint commemoration of the whole family in its ancient liturgical books.

Canonization and Feast Day

Rome’s ancient martyrology, rather than any later canonization process, has carried Getulius’s memory forward for nineteen centuries, commemorating him and his family together as it has done since the persecution that claimed them all.

What Catholics Can Learn Today

A father remembered chiefly through the fidelity of the wife and sons who followed him shows that the witness of a Christian household is often a shared inheritance, in which one generation’s faith becomes the ground on which the next generation’s courage is built.

A Prayer to Saint Getulius

Saint Getulius, father whose fidelity became the seed of your family’s own witness, watch over Christian households today, that faith may be handed on faithfully from parents to children in every generation. Amen.

Sources

• Roman Martyrology
• Butler’s Lives of the Saints
• New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia, entry on Saint Symphorosa