St John at the Latin Gate
Today is a secondary Feast of our Patron Saint, St John the Apostle.
Domitian was then Emperor—the tyrant over Rome and the world. Whether it were that John understood this journey of his own free choice, and from a wish to visit the Mother-Church, or that he was led thither bound with chains, in obedience to an imperial edict—John, the august founder of the Seven Churches of Asia Minor, appeared before the Tribunal of pagan Rome. He was convicted of having propagated, in a vast province of the Empire, the worship of a Jew that had been crucified under Pontius Pilate. He was a superstitious and rebellious old man, and it was time to rid Asia of his presence. He was therefore sentenced to an ignominious and cruel death. He had somehow escaped Nero’s power; but he should not elude the vengeance of Cæsar Domitian!
A huge cauldron of boiling oil is prepared in front of the Latin Gate. The sentence orders that the preacher of Christ be plunged into this bath. The hour is come for the second son of Salome to partake of his Master’s Chalice. John’s heart leaps with joy at the thought that he—the most dear to Jesus, and yet the only Apostle that has not suffered death for him—is at least permitted to give him this earnest of his love. After cruelly scourging him, the executioners seize the old man, and throw him into the cauldron; but lo! the boiling liquid has lost all its heat; the Apostle feels no scalding; on the contrary, when they take him out again, he feels all the vigor of his youthful years restored to him. The Prætor’s cruelty is foiled and John, the Martyr in desire, is to be left to the Church for some few years longer. An imperial decree banishes him to the rugged Isle of Patmos, where God reveals to him the future of the Church, even to the end of time.
The Church of Rome, which counts the abode and martyrdom of St. John as one of her most glorious memories, has marked, with a Basilica, the spot where the Apostle bore his noble testimony to the Christian Faith. This Basilica stands near the Latin Gate, and give a title to one of the Cardinals.
— Dom Prosper Gueranger, The Liturgical Year
St. John suffered above the other saints a martyrdom of love, being a martyr, and more than a martyr, at the foot of the cross of his divine Master, with the true lovers of Jesus, Magdalen, and the Blessed Virgin mother. All his sufferings were by love and compassion imprinted in his soul, and thus shared by him. O singular happiness of St. John, to have stood under the cross of Christ, so near his divine person, when the other disciples had all forsaken him! O extraordinary privilege, to have suffered martyrdom in the person of Jesus, and been eye-witness or all he did or endured, and of all that happened to him in that great sacrifice and mystery!3 Here he drank of his cup; this was truly a martyrdom, and our Saviour exempted all those who had assisted at the martyrdom of his cross from suffering death by the hands of persecutors. St. John, nevertheless, received also the crown of this second martyrdom, to which the sacrifice of his will was not wanting, but only the execution.
— Fr. Alban Butler, The Lives of the Saints