Saint Agatha of Catania

Through every disaster, the people of Catania have set their hope on a daughter of their own city: Saint Agatha.

She lived and died for Christ in the middle of the third century, when confessing the faith could cost a person the cruelest punishments. The Church has always counted her among the first virgin martyrs, and every February 5 her feast is kept with deep gratitude for this brave young witness.

The ancient accounts tell that Agatha was born into a wealthy, noble family of deep faith. She grew up remarkably beautiful, but she saw early how fleeting beauty is, and she promised to give her whole life to Christ as his bride.

But her beauty and wealth caught the eye of Quintianus, the Roman governor of Sicily, a man driven by lust, greedy for money and drunk on power. Using the new edicts against Christians as cover, Quintianus had Agatha arrested, meaning to force her to give in to his desires.

At that time, a Roman governor held almost complete power of life and death over a vast territory, answerable to no one but the distant emperor in Rome. Against such power, a young woman on her own, even one of noble birth, had nothing to defend herself with but her faith. So Agatha’s story is about more than persecution. It lays bare a bitter truth of every age: power that answers to no one tends to trample those who have no voice.

But Agatha’s soul was built on the rock of faith. She kept on fasting and praying and flatly refused every foul temptation. In the end the brothel keeper gave up, handed her back to the judge and complained:

“It would be easier to soften rock than to bend the heart of this girl!”

Humiliated that his plan had failed, Quintianus summoned Agatha to a public trial. He asked haughtily:

“You are of noble birth, so why do you lower yourself to live the base life of the Christians?”

That answer must have stunned the whole court. In a society where noble rank was considered the highest honor a person could reach, Agatha overturned that whole scale of values with a single sentence. She did not deny her noble lineage, but she showed that there is a freedom greater than any title: the freedom of a soul with nothing left to lose, because it has freely given itself entirely to the One it loves.

The most barbaric cruelty came when the tyrant ordered the young woman’s breasts cut off. Agatha faced the inhuman judge and rebuked him:

“Cruel tyrant, are you not ashamed to torture in a woman’s body the very part with which your own mother nursed you and raised you?”

This harrowing detail is why, in sacred art, Saint Agatha is often painted holding a dish bearing her severed breasts, and why women suffering grave illnesses of the breast, especially breast cancer, have always turned to her for help.

There is something worth pondering in Agatha’s answer to the tyrant: she did not scream curses at her fate, nor beg for pity. She reminded him of the mother who bore him, of the humanity he had perhaps long since lost amid power and lust. Her words cut like a sword, yet they carried a strange compassion for the very man who was tormenting her.

Tradition tells that in the darkness of the dungeon, the Apostle Peter appeared to comfort her and heal her bodily wounds, filling the prison with a wondrous light.

The next day, seeing her healed and still firmly confessing her faith, the judge flew into a frenzy and ordered live coals and sharp potsherds spread on the ground, and her naked body rolled over them.

At that very moment, a violent earthquake shook Catania, bringing down a great wall of the courthouse and crushing two of the judge’s aides. The terrified people rushed in to protest the governor’s cruelty, forcing him to hurry Agatha back to her dungeon.

In utter panic, Christians and pagans alike ran to Saint Agatha’s tomb and took the veil that lay over it. People said this very veil had been licked by flames during her torment without being scorched at all. They held it high like a banner and went out to meet the river of fire. To everyone’s wonder, the lava stopped and turned aside, sparing the city at the last moment. From then on Saint Agatha was the patron who protected the people of Catania from fire, disaster and the volcano. That veil, with her other relics, is still kept with honor in the Cathedral of Catania, built at the end of the eleventh century. Whenever the volcano stirs, and every year on her feast, the people of the city carry those relics in procession through the streets for days and nights on end, in one of the largest religious festivals in all of Italy.