Nepomuk

Nepomuk (or POMUK), JOHN OF, the patron saint of Bohemia, who is honoured as a martyr of the seal of confession, was born at Pomuk, a few miles SE. from Pilsen, about 1330. Having studied at the university of Prague and taken holy orders, he held various ecclesiastical offices in Prague, and was appointed confessor to Sophia, wife of King Wenceslaus IV. For refusing to betray to this monarch the confession of the queen John was put to the torture, then tied hand and foot, and flung into the Moldau, in March 1383. His memory was cherished with peculiar affection by the Bohemian people, and in 1729 he was canonised by Pope Benedict XIII. His memory is celebrated on 16th May. By some historians two distinct personages of the same name are enumerated—one, the martyr of the confessional, the other, a victim to the simoniacal tyranny of Wenceslaus; but the identity of the two is sustained by Palacky, Geschichte von Böhmen, iii. 62. In 1855 Abel tried to prove that John of Nepomuk was a merely Catholic transformation of the people's darling, the heretical John Huss. See Wratislaw's Life, Legend, and Canonisation of St John Nepomucen (1873).