The patron saint of Scordia is Saint Roch, celebrated on 16 August: the patronal feast, however, is held in the height of summer, in the first half of the month, with a nine-day novena on whose Sunday a procession is held with the saint's relic, an ex ossibus kept in the mother church. On 15 August, the solemnity of the Assumption, the town Mass is celebrated in Piazza San Rocco, at the end of which the patron's wooden statue is displayed on the forecourt; on 16 August, after Mass in the square, the statue is placed in an ornate processional litter and crosses the town's streets. The procession is repeated the following week, on 23 August, for the feast's Octave.
The mother church of San Rocco was rebuilt according to Baroque canons in 1712, taking on the Latin-cross shape it still retains today thanks to a further mid-19th-century intervention commissioned by the then archpriest, Don Mario De Cristofaro; inside it holds the saint's statue and several valuable works. The oldest known mention of Scordia's place name dates from a charter of 2 July 1131, in which the Norman nobleman Henry de Bubly donated some holdings to the church of San Giovanni di Gerusalemme in Messina.
