Thursday,
12/13/12
Today is the Feast of St.
Lucy, or Sancta Lucia, who was put to death in 303 during the persecution of
Emperor Diocletian. None of the stories about St. Lucy can be authenticated,
but the abundance of fond Christian traditions dealing with Lucy earn a right to
our attention.
Lucy’s mother Eutchia was
a lady who for years had suffered from dysentery. That had the pair journeying
from their home in Syracuse Sicily to the tomb of St. Agatha in Catania Sicily.
Eutychia received her cure, and Lucy heard the prophecy that her tomb in
Syracuse would be as famous as Agatha’s in Catania. That prophesy settled
Lucy’s mind on what she had been secretly intending. She vowed her virginity to
God.
Before her father died he
had left Lucy’s dowry money with her mother Eutychia. With Lucy having made
that vow, Eutychia took the sum bequeathed for Lucy’s dowry, giving it to the
poor.
When Lucy’s intended
learned of Lucy’s unwillingness to marry him, and when he heard of Eutychia’s
giving to the poor the money he had been counting on, he reported Lucy to
Diocletian’s soldiers as a Christian. For her tenacious beliefs the judge
sentenced Lucy to life in a brothel, but Lucy, standing before him, declared that
as long as she withstood sin in her heart, nothing forced on her would be
sinful for her. She said, “We can never be forced to sin against our will.”
A miraculous aspect of
the tales told about Lucy had it happen that when the soldiers tried to haul her off, her weight seemed to
have increased to too many tons for the soldiers to budge. The story goes that they
even hitched her to a team of oxen. When it could not move her, they finished
her off with a dagger into her throat.
Lucy is the patron saint
of blind people. One tradition has it that her fiancée had a fondness for her
eyes, and he received a gift of them at her execution. Dante gave Lucy, holding
her eyes, a very high place in his Paradiso.
I
heard a story about church officials centuries later opening Lucy’s tomb in
Syracuse. Finding her corpse still fresh under a linen cloth, out of respect for
the Lord’s virgin, they reinterred her without lifting the cloth.
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