St. Denis and Companions

Their story

Denis was a missionary bishop sent from Rome to Gaul, in what is now France, around the middle of the third century. According to St. Gregory of Tours, writing a few centuries later, he was one of a group of bishops sent to bring the Gospel to the Gauls. Denis settled in Paris, then a small town on an island in the Seine River, and became its first bishop. With his companions, a priest named Rusticus and a deacon named Eleutherius, he preached and won many converts. During a persecution, probably around 258, the three were arrested and beheaded on a hill outside the city. The hill came to be known as Montmartre, "the mount of the martyrs." A famous legend says that after his execution Denis picked up his head and walked some distance, preaching as he went, to the place where he wished to be buried. For this reason he is often shown in art holding his own head. A chapel was built over the martyrs' tomb, and it later grew into the great abbey church of Saint-Denis, where the kings of France were buried for centuries. Denis became one of the patron saints of France and one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, and people have long prayed to him for relief from headaches.