The life of Terence, Neonila and Children
Church tradition recounts a series of dramatic tortures that could not touch them: they were bound and struck, thrown to wild beasts that would not harm them, and cast into a cauldron of boiling pitch from which they emerged unburned. Such accounts, common to many ancient martyr narratives, are best read as the Church's honoring of the family's united witness rather than as a precise record of events. In the end, seeing that nothing broke their resolve, the authorities had the entire family beheaded together. The Church remembers Terence and Neonila and their seven children as a single household bound in one confession and one martyrdom.
