St. Stephen

St. Stephen is the first martyr of the Church, whose witness is recorded in chapters six and seven of the Acts of the Apostles. A Greek-speaking Jewish Christian in the earliest Jerusalem community, he was one of the seven men "filled with the Spirit and wisdom" chosen by the apostles and ordained to serve at table and care for the community's widows—the ministry the Church has always regarded as the origin of the diaconate. Acts describes him as "full of grace and power," working great wonders and debating with such wisdom that his opponents could not withstand him. Accused by false witnesses of speaking against the temple and the law, Stephen was brought before the Sanhedrin. His long defense, preserved in Acts 7, retold the history of Israel and ended with a piercing indictment of his hearers for resisting the Holy Spirit. When he declared that he saw the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God, the crowd dragged him outside the city and stoned him—probably around the year 34. As he died he echoed his Master: "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit," and "Lord, do not hold this sin against them." Among the witnesses, guarding the cloaks of the executioners, stood a young man named Saul, the future apostle Paul. As the protomartyr, Stephen holds a singular place in Christian devotion: the first to follow Christ through death, in a death consciously patterned on the Lord's own. From ancient times the Church has kept his feast on December 26, the day after Christmas—the first of the "companions of Christ" honored in the octave of the Nativity. According to a widely circulated fifth-century account, his relics were discovered near Jerusalem in 415, an event that spread his cult across the Christian world; tradition holds that some of these relics were later brought to Rome and laid beside St. Lawrence in the basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, where pilgrims honor the two deacon-martyrs together. Venerated since the apostolic age, long before formal canonization processes, Stephen is the patron of deacons and of stonemasons.