St. Florian of Lorch

Florian was born around the year two hundred and fifty in Aelium Cetium, in the Roman province of Noricum (in what is today Lower Austria). He rose to the rank of senior officer in the Roman civil administration of the province, with charge over the imperial fire brigades, the official watchmen against fires, both natural and arson, in the cities along the Danube frontier.

When the persecution of Diocletian was published in 303, the prefect Aquilinus was sent into Noricum to enforce it. Some forty Christian soldiers from the garrison at Lauriacum were arrested, refused to sacrifice, and were imprisoned. Florian, hearing of them, left his post at Aelium Cetium and went down to Lauriacum to stand with them.

He met the prefect on the road, was recognized, was challenged to sacrifice, and refused. He said, as the early Latin Acts record, that he had been a Christian since his youth and would not now learn another way of praying. He was scourged, his shoulder blades were broken, and a millstone was tied around his neck. He was thrown from the bridge over the river Enns and drowned. The forty soldiers were beheaded shortly after.

A pious Christian woman named Valeria, the Acts say, was given his body by night and buried him quietly on her land. A church rose over the grave, then an abbey, the great Augustinian abbey of Sankt Florian, still standing today in Upper Austria, on the spot of his burial. From there his name spread through Bavaria, Bohemia, Hungary, and especially Poland, where King Casimir II in 1184 obtained a portion of his relics and made him a co-patron of the realm.

St. Florian is venerated among the Western martyrs of the pre-Schism Church received by the Eastern Orthodox Church, the so-called Saints of the Undivided Church, whose witness is from the seven hundred years before the breach of 1054 and is held in common by both East and West. The Polish Autocephalous Orthodox Church keeps his feast on May 4 in the Old Calendar reckoning, and a number of other Slavic Orthodox jurisdictions of Central Europe likewise commemorate him. Outside the liturgical calendar he is widely known as the heavenly patron of those whose work is to stand between people and fire, fire fighters, chimney sweeps, brewers, and soap makers, and of the city of Linz and the land of Upper Austria.