Saint Agatha (c. 231-251)

One of the seven women of the Roman Canon

Saint Agatha's place in the Church is measured first not by her paintings, but by the liturgy. Since antiquity, the first Eucharistic Prayer — the Roman Canon — names, after the apostles and the first martyr popes, a short list of seven holy women: Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia and Anastasia^[6][7]. To be inscribed in this catalogue is to belong to the very small number of martyrs whose name is spoken, day after day, at every Mass celebrated according to this Canon throughout the world. This list was stabilised no later than the pontificate of Saint Gregory the Great (590-604)^[8].

Agatha holds a place of honour in it: she is cited before Lucy and Agnes, the two other great virgin-martyrs. From the 5th century onwards, her cult overflowed Sicily: the Catholic Encyclopedia notes that "her veneration as a saint had, even in antiquity, spread far beyond her native city"^[9]. For a provincial girl who died obscurely in a Catania prison, this is an extraordinary radiance — the sign that a real and shattering fact imposed itself on the memory of the whole Church.

The saint of Catania and the name "the good"

Agatha's name comes from the Greek agathê, "the good, the excellent"^[10]. The Fathers and the liturgists saw a programme in this name: she is "good" by nature and by grace, offered wholly to God. The liturgy of her feast, in the old rite, plays at length on this name — "bona", the good one — to designate her who preferred to lose her body rather than her soul.

Agatha is Catanian. Her city, at the foot of Etna, has always claimed her as its daughter and queen: she is familiarly called there "Sant'Àjita" and "a Santuzza", "the little saint". The rivalry is old with Palermo, which long claimed to have seen her born too; but the majority tradition, followed by the Catholic Encyclopedia and by the cult itself, places both her birth and her death at Catania^[11][12].

The sources of her life

As with most martyrs of the early Church, two levels must be distinguished. On the one hand, a solid historical core: a virgin named Agatha, martyred at Catania, whose cult is attested very early and very widely. On the other, a developed hagiographical narrative, the Passio sanctae Agathae, written in the 5th-6th centuries, which stages the details of the trial, the dialogues and the miracles.

The Catholic Encyclopedia is frank on this point: "we possess no certain information regarding the details of her glorious death", and the Latin Acta "have no claim to historical credibility" in their romantic menu^[13]. But the antiquity of the cult is beyond doubt:

The convergence is clear: long before the Passio dressed her story in dialogues, Agatha was already one of the most famous martyrs in Christendom. The detailed account that follows must therefore be read for what it is: the Christian memory of a real martyrdom, handed down with the freedom proper to ancient hagiography, but faithful to a certain fact — a virgin of Catania who died for Christ.

The persecution of Decius (250-251)

Agatha died under the emperor Decius, whose persecution (250-251) was the first general and systematic persecution in the history of the Church. By an edict of 250, Decius ordered all the inhabitants of the Empire to sacrifice to the gods and to obtain a certificate (libellus) testifying that they had done so. Refusal meant torture and death. This trial struck the whole of Christendom — it is the same persecution that saw the martyrdom of Pope Saint Fabian and the apostasy of many lapsi^[20]. Sicily, a rich Roman province and Rome's granary, did not escape it.

The Catholic Encyclopedia retains, "as probably resting on an ancient tradition", that Agatha's martyrdom belongs "to the persecution of Decius (250-253)"^[21]. It is therefore around 251 that her death must be placed, at Catania, when she was, according to tradition, about twenty years old.

A virgin of the nobility of Catania

The Passio makes Agatha a child of a noble, rich and Christian family^[22]. This detail illuminates the whole drama: beautiful, well-born, an heiress, she is a coveted match. But Agatha has made, very young, the vow of virginity: she has given herself to Christ and will belong to no one else. Her beauty and her fortune, which should have made her worldly happiness, become the cause of her passion, for they whet the greed of a powerful man.

This type — the noble young girl who refuses pagan marriage in the name of an invisible Bridegroom — is that of the great Roman virgin-martyrs: Agnes at Rome, Lucy at Syracuse, Agatha at Catania. In them, the religious refusal to worship idols and the intimate refusal to surrender their bodies are one: they have already given themselves, wholly, to another.

Quintian's refusal

Agatha's persecutor is Quintian (Quintianus), governor of Sicily. The Passio paints him as a man of low extraction, greedy and sensual, who covets at once the young girl's beauty, fortune and rank: marrying her would give him everything together^[23][24]. He first believes he holds a simple means: since Agatha is a Christian, Decius's edict puts her at his mercy. Either she yields, or she dies.

But Agatha does not yield. To the man who promises her honours and pleasures, she opposes a freedom beyond him: according to the Passio, being the slave of Christ, she is freer than all, for this servitude is the highest nobility^[25].

The house of Aphrodisia

Since threats are not enough, Quintian changes method. He entrusts Agatha to a procuress named Aphrodisia and her daughters, keepers of a house of debauchery, to break the virgin's will through seduction and corruption^[26][27]. For a month, Agatha is besieged with flattery, promises and threats. In vain: her firmness exhausts her corrupters. Aphrodisia ends by admitting to Quintian that she is failing, that this young girl has a head harder than rock and will not be made to change.

This forced stay in the house of debauchery — which the martyr crosses without being defiled — is the Catanian counterpart of Agnes's brothel at Rome and of Lucy's miraculous immobility at Syracuse: in all three cases, God Himself defends the purity of His virgin, and the planned outrage turns into a demonstration of His protection.

The severed breasts and Agatha's answer

Furious, Quintian then has Agatha brought before him and subjects her to torture: the rack, the hooks, the burns. According to the Passio, the saint finds great joy in it: as grain reaches the granary only after being threshed and winnowed, her soul cannot enter bliss unless her body is delivered to suffering^[28].

Faced with such constancy, Quintian orders the torment that will remain for ever attached to Agatha's name: to tear off her breasts with pincers^[29][30]. It is then that the martyr, from the depths of her pain, hurls at the tyrant a word of dazzling boldness, denouncing the very obscenity of his deed: he is not ashamed, she tells him in substance, to mutilate in a woman what he himself sucked at his mother's breast^[31].

This retort — which opposes the brutality of the man to the very source of the life he despises — has crossed the centuries. It says everything about the reversal worked by martyrdom: the victim dominates her executioner, not by force, but by truth.

The vision of Saint Peter

Sent back to prison, mutilated and bleeding, Agatha is left without care, on Quintian's order forbidding her doctor and food. It is then that the miracle illuminating her whole martyrdom takes place. In the heart of the night, an old man enters her dungeon, preceded by a child bearing a light, and offers to tend her wounds. Agatha first refuses: never has she let a man's hand touch her body. The old man smiles and makes himself known: he is an apostle of Christ, come to heal her in His name^[32].

At these words, the apostle Peter disappears, and Agatha finds that her breasts have been restored to her and all her wounds healed^[33][34]. The prison fills with a light so bright that the guards flee in terror, leaving the door open; but Agatha refuses to flee, wishing not to lose the crown of patience. This healing by the prince of the apostles is not a mere consoling prodigy: it seals Agatha's belonging to the Church of Christ and makes Saint Peter himself the guarantor of her holiness.

Death in prison

The next day, Quintian, learning that Agatha is healed, orders a last torment: she is rolled naked on burning potsherds mingled with embers^[35][36]. At that very moment, a violent earthquake shakes Catania; two walls collapse and bury the governor's counsellors, while the terrified people demand an end to the tortures. Quintian, frightened, has Agatha brought back to prison. There, the virgin raises a last prayer and gives her soul to God, around 5 February 251.

According to the Passio, she then entrusts her soul to the Lord who protected her from the cradle, tore her from the love of the world and made her patient in suffering.^[37]

Thus dies Agatha: not beheaded in one stroke, like Agnes, but worn down by tortures and carried off in her prison, faithful to her last breath. The violence of Rome raged against her body; it could not reach her soul.

The tablet: "Mentem sanctam, spontaneam"

According to the Passio, while Agatha's body was being buried, a young man dressed in silk — an angel, says tradition — appeared near the tomb and laid upon it a marble tablet bearing a mysterious inscription^[38][39]:

"A holy and willing mind, honour to God and deliverance of the fatherland." — The angel's tablet, Passio sanctae Agathae^[40]

This formula — which tradition sums up by the initials M.S.S.H.D.E.P.L. — enjoyed an immense fortune. It was found engraved, until the 18th century, on countless bells in Italy and Europe: Agatha being invoked against fire and lightning, her epitaph protected bell towers^[41]. Above all, it announces in advance what will make the saint's particular glory: she will be the liberator of her fatherland, the protectress of Catania.

The veil against the fire of Etna (February 252, according to tradition)

According to the Passio, taken up by the Golden Legend, the announcement comes true the year after her martyrdom: at the beginning of February — that is, in the traditional chronology, in February 252 — Mount Etna erupts and a torrent of lava descends, inexorable, towards Catania. Then, Christians and pagans together run to the martyr's tomb, seize the veil (velo) covering her burial and hold it up, like a standard, before the river of fire. The lava stops dead, sparing the city^[42][43][44].

This miracle has become the heart of Catanian devotion. For seventeen centuries, whenever Etna threatens the city, the veil — today kept as an illustrious relic — is brought out and carried in procession against the lava. The chronicles report several interventions over the centuries, notably during the great eruptions of the 17th century. The Catholic Encyclopedia notes soberly: "throughout the region around Mt. Etna she is invoked against the eruptions of the volcano"^[45]. The saint of interior fire — that of the charity that bore her up under torture — has become the saint who masters the fire of the earth.

A cult attested from antiquity

Agatha's radiance is one of the earliest in all hagiography. From the 5th century, her feast of 5 February figures in the oldest martyrologies of the Church, the Hieronymian and the Carthaginian^[46]. At Rome itself, Pope Symmachus (498-514) dedicates a church to her, and above all Saint Gregory the Great, at the end of the 6th century, has the old Arian church of the Quirinal reconsecrated to Catholic worship, known ever since as Sant'Agata dei Goti ("Saint Agatha of the Goths")^[47]. The poet Venantius Fortunatus, in Gaul, sings of her in his verse; the Englishman Aldhelm, in the 7th century, ranks her among the great virgins in his treatise De laude virginitatis^[48]. In less than three centuries, the little martyr of Catania is venerated from Sicily to England.

The theft and return of the relics (1040-1126)

The history of Agatha's relics is a novel in itself. In 1040, the Byzantine general George Maniakes, having retaken Sicily from the Arabs, lays hands on the island's two greatest treasures: the bodies of Saint Agatha of Catania and Saint Lucy of Syracuse. He sends them to Constantinople, hoping to regain the emperor's favour with this gift^[49][50].

Agatha's relics remain nearly a century in exile. Then, in 1126, two soldiers who served in the Byzantine army and were devotees of the saint — Gislibert (also called Gilbert) and Goselm, one of French origin, the other a native of Gallipoli — secretly bring her remains back from Constantinople to Sicily and hand them to Bishop Maurice at the castle of Aci. On 17 August 1126, the relics triumphantly re-enter Catania, where they have rested ever since in the cathedral dedicated to the saint^[51]. This anniversary of the return — Sant'Agata d'Agosto — has remained, with 5 February, one of the two great dates of the Catanian cult.

The feast of Catania and the breads of Saint Agatha

The feast of Saint Agatha, every 5 February (with an extension on 17 August), is one of the greatest popular religious feasts in the Catholic world, gathering hundreds of thousands of faithful. The silver bust-reliquary and the shrine are carried through the city on a heavy vara, drawn by thousands of devotees dressed in the traditional white robe, to the cry of "Cittadini, semu tutti divoti tutti!"^[52].

The feast also has its sweetmeats, all marked by the memory of the martyrdom. There are prepared the famous minne di Sant'Agata ("Saint Agatha's breasts"): little round cakes, iced in white and topped with a candied cherry, which evoke with all-Sicilian tenderness the saint's torment^[53]. There are also blessed breads — the pani di Sant'Agata — distributed to the faithful, prolonging the ancient gesture of blessing bread on her feast day. From the horror of the torment, popular piety has drawn symbols of life, food and consolation.

Iconography and patronages

In art, Saint Agatha is immediately recognisable: she is depicted as a young woman holding a tray (or a book) on which rest her two severed breasts — an attribute so singular that in the Middle Ages it was sometimes mistaken for two loaves or two bells, hence the strengthened link with the blessing of bread and bells^[54]. Her other attributes are the pincers (or large tongs) of her torment, the martyr's palm, the veil and sometimes the torch or the embers. The greatest painters — Zurbarán, Sebastiano del Piombo, Tiepolo, Guido Cagnacci — fixed her image of sorrowful and serene dignity.

Her patronage flows entirely from her story. She is the patroness of Catania, of Malta, of San Marino and of Molise^[55]. Because of her severed breasts, she is invoked by women suffering from diseases of the breast — and today she has become a familiar figure of prayer for those ill with breast cancer^[56]. Because of the veil and Etna, she protects against fire, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and lightning — hence her link with bell founders. She is lastly the patroness of wet nurses and goldsmiths. Rarely has a saint woven so direct a link between the nature of her torment and the nature of her protection.

An anthropological reading: fire, blood, milk

The legend of Saint Agatha has also held the attention of religious ethnology. In a study published in 1993 in the Revue des sciences sociales de la France de l'Est, the ethnologist Isabelle Bianquis-Gasser analyses the Catanian feast of 5 February as the synthesis of three symbols of fecundity: the fire of Etna, which the saint masters each year on the anniversary of her death; the blood shed by the martyrdom of the severed breasts; and milk, since Agatha, patroness of wet nurses, remains invoked for lactation and the healing of breasts^[57]. This reading does not compete with the supernatural meaning of the cult — the miracle of the veil against the lava, the healing by the apostle Saint Peter — but it illuminates why popular piety has associated so closely, in the minne di Sant'Agata as in the invocations of wet nurses, the martyr's wound with the life she now protects.

More than seventeen centuries later, Saint Agatha speaks with undiminished force. She is first the saint of interior freedom. To the man who holds every power over her — wealth, rank, life and death — she opposes an answer nothing can take from her: given to Christ as His slave, it is in this servitude that she is free^[68]. Her virginity is not a refusal to love, but a greater, exclusive love, which makes her impregnable. In a world that confuses freedom with the absence of every bond, Agatha testifies that the only bond that truly liberates is the one uniting us to God.

She is then the saint of all who suffer in their flesh. Mutilated precisely where a woman gives and nourishes life, she has become, through the centuries, the patroness of those ill with breast disease and the friend of all women whom sickness or violence strikes in their bodily dignity. Her retort to the executioner — daring to mutilate what he himself received from a mother — is not only heroic insolence: it is the defence of the dignity of the female body, despised and yet sacred, the source of all human life^[69]. To those who suffer, Agatha shows that the wounded body can become, in Christ, a glorious body: her breasts are restored to her by an apostle's hand.

She is lastly the saint of mastered fire. Against Etna, against blazes, against all that threatens to sweep everything away, Catania has learned to hold up her veil and to hope. This gesture states a very simple conviction: that the intercession of the saints is not a pious image, but a real force, capable of stopping lava itself. Saint Agatha, who crossed the fire of torture without being inwardly consumed, remains for all the one who, from the midst of flames, keeps the heart at peace.

The Passio lends her this word, which sums up, better than any other, what the Church has always venerated in the virgin of Catania: her torments are her joy, like grain threshed before being carried to the granary.^[70]

• Saint Lucy (c. 283-304) — the other great virgin-martyr of Sicily, devotee of Saint Agatha, whose relics were stolen and exiled at the same time as hers.
• Saint Agnes (c. 291–c. 304) — child-martyr of Rome under the persecution of Diocletian, whose brothel miracle echoes the house of Aphrodisia.
• Saint Cecilia — Roman virgin and martyr, named with Agatha in the Canon of the Mass.
• Saint Peter the Apostle — the prince of the apostles, who appeared to Agatha in her prison to heal her wounds.
• Saint Gregory the Great (540-604) — the pope under whom the list of the holy women of the Roman Canon, in which Saint Agatha figures, was fixed.