Formerio

Who they were

Tradition presents Saint Formerio as a young Christian shepherd, sometimes said to be from a place called 'Cesarea', martyred during a Roman-era persecution and venerated at Bañares (La Rioja, Spain). The sources that tell his story in detail are late, and scholars from the 18th and 19th centuries onward, including the Bollandists, judged the fuller 'Acta' published in the 1600s to have no historical value; a careful 1781 study likewise concluded that neither the place and time of his life nor the circumstances of his martyrdom could be established with certainty. What is historically solid is only an ancient martyr who was the object of local devotion; the biographical details belong to a later stage in the growth of his legend, and a fine medieval reliquary chest kept at Bañares attests to the long history of that devotion.

The best-known version of the legend makes him an orphaned young shepherd of a well-off family who gave away his goods to the poor, miraculously received a shepherd's staff and a book of the Gospels, and could tame wild animals; a later story adds that he was martyred under Aurelian around 277, surviving trial by fire and a lion in the arena before being beheaded, his body later recovered by a disciple named Coloma or Camila with the help of two converted soldiers and brought to Bañares. None of this can be verified from any independent ancient source, and even the earliest local writer on the subject, in the 16th century, admitted he knew nothing of the martyr's actual deeds; a separate but related veneration of a saint of the same name exists in nearby Treviño, and scholars have long debated whether one figure or two lie behind the two traditions.

The miracles

There was never a formal cause: he has been honoured as a saint since before the Church's formal processes began.

Why that counted as sanctity

Martyr venerated locally at Bañares (La Rioja, Spain) since ancient times, though his life is known only through late and historically unreliable legend; feast 25 September.