Valerian of Abbenza

Who they were

Commemoration of Saint Valerian, bishop of Avensa in North Africa, who, at more than eighty years of age, during the Vandal persecution, firmly refused to hand over the sacred furnishings of the Church as King Genseric demanded, and for this was driven out of the city all alone, with the order that no one should give him shelter either in a house or in the fields; he therefore lay for a long time in the open on the public road, and in this way came to the end of his holy life as a confessor of the true faith.

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

The Roman Martyrology remembers him on 15 December as an aged bishop who refused to hand over the Church's sacred furnishings to King Genseric and died cast out on the open road.