Saint Vibiana

Saint Vibiana is the Roman martyr whose relics rest in Los Angeles. On 9 December 1853 her tomb was opened in a catacomb near the Appian Way. The marble tablet that closed it was cut with a laurel wreath, the mark of a martyr among the ancient Christians, and with the words to the soul of the innocent and pure Vibiana. Nothing further of her is known: not her family, not the year she died, not the manner of her death. She is held to have been a virgin martyr of the third century.

Pope Pius IX gave her relics to Thaddeus Amat, the newly named bishop of Monterey, whose diocese then took in Los Angeles, and chose her name for the cathedral that bishop was to build. The Cathedral of Saint Vibiana was dedicated on 30 April 1876, and she was laid in a reliquary of gilt and plate glass in a niche above its high altar. When the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels was dedicated in 2002 she was carried there, and she lies now in its crypt mausoleum.

She is a patroness of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which keeps her memorial on 1 September.

She is not Saint Bibiana of Rome, whose feast is 2 December and whose body was recorded in her own basilica inside the walls of Rome in the fifth century. The two names are variants of one another, and older sources, including the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, print the Roman martyr's name as Bibiana (Vibiana). That is how the two came to be told as one.