St. Bartholomew

In 838 the Lombard prince Sicardo had the relics of the apostle Bartholomew carried from the island of Lipari, where Arab raids threatened them, to Benevento, his southern capital. The translation made the city a pilgrimage destination that rivalled Naples in prestige, and the cathedral was rebuilt to house the apostle worthily. The Church keeps his feast on August 24.

Bartholomew is named in all three synoptic lists of the Twelve and in Acts, always paired with Philip; from the ninth century the Western tradition identifies him with the Nathanael whom Philip brings to Jesus in the first chapter of John — the one greeted as an Israelite without guile. The tradition of his preaching in Armenia and his death by flaying is transmitted by Eusebius and the later apocryphal acts. Michelangelo painted him in the Last Judgment holding his own skin, with the face on it his own.

In 983 Otto III built the church of San Bartolomeo all'Isola on the Tiber island at Rome, over the ruins of the temple of Aesculapius, and a portion of the relics was brought there. Benevento has always maintained that the greater part remains in its cathedral. The Roman church is now the memorial to the New Martyrs of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a dedication John Paul II gave it in 2000 — the apostle flayed for the faith keeping company with those killed for it in living memory.