Saint Lucy

Saint Lucy, known in Latin as Lucia and in Italian as Santa Lucia, was a Christian virgin martyr of Syracuse in Sicily, commemorated throughout the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Anglican Communion. Tradition places her life in the late third and early fourth centuries, during the last great persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire under the emperor Diocletian. She is believed to have belonged to a prosperous family of Syracuse; her father died during her childhood, leaving Lucy in the care of her mother, Eutychia. From an early age, according to the later hagiographical accounts, Lucy resolved to remain a virgin and to devote her life and fortune to Christ and to the poor. A precise year of birth is not attested in contemporary sources and should not be treated as historically verified.

The most widely circulated medieval passio relates that Eutychia suffered for years from a hemorrhage. Lucy persuaded her mother to travel to Catania to pray at the tomb of Saint Agatha, the earlier Sicilian martyr. There Eutychia was cured. In thanksgiving, and in keeping with Lucy's own wish, the mother consented that Lucy should not marry and that her dowry should be distributed to the needy. A pagan suitor to whom Lucy had been promised, deprived of both marriage and wealth, denounced her to Paschasius, the governor of Syracuse, as a Christian who refused the imperial religion. Brought to trial, Lucy would not offer sacrifice or recant. The legendary acts describe a series of failed torments: she was condemned to be violated in a brothel, yet could not be moved from the spot even by oxen; fire was applied to her without effect. She was at last killed by a wound to the throat with a sword or dagger. Tradition assigns the martyrdom to 304, during the Diocletianic persecution, though the detailed narrative of the passion was composed centuries later and is largely legendary.

A later medieval development of the legend, not present in the earliest texts, holds that her eyes were torn out, either as a punishment or by Lucy herself so that a suitor who praised their beauty would be deterred. She is therefore frequently shown in art holding a platter with a pair of eyes, and she became the principal patron of the blind and of those afflicted with diseases of the eyes. Although these ocular details are medieval elaborations, they have shaped her iconography and her principal patronages down to the present.

The existence of a martyr named Lucy at Syracuse is supported by early liturgical and archaeological evidence even when the picturesque acts are set aside. Her name appears in ancient martyrologies, including the Martyrologium Hieronymianum, and she is named in early Roman sacramentaries. A shrine and inscriptions in the catacombs of Syracuse attest to an early cult. By the sixth century her feast on 13 December was firmly established in the West. She is one of the few female saints mentioned in the Communicantes of the Roman Canon of the Mass, alongside Agatha, Agnes, Cecilia, and others. Pope Gregory the Great knew her cult. Her relics were long kept in Syracuse. In the eleventh century they were taken to Constantinople by the Byzantine general George Maniakes; after the Fourth Crusade in 1204 they were brought to Venice, where they are now enshrined in the church of San Geremia. Some relics have been returned to Syracuse, where the cathedral and the basilica of Santa Lucia al Sepolcro continue her cult.

Lucy is invoked as patron of the city of Syracuse, of the blind, of those suffering from eye disease and throat ailments, of writers, salesmen, glaziers, cutlers, laborers, and peasants, and against hemorrhages. In northern Europe, especially Sweden, Norway, and Finland, her December feast became a festival of light in the dark of winter, with processions of girls wearing crowns of candles. Historians treat the picturesque details of her acts with caution, but they generally accept that a virgin martyr of Syracuse named Lucy died in the Diocletianic persecution and that her cult spread rapidly through the Christian world from the fourth and fifth centuries onward. She was venerated as a saint from antiquity by popular acclaim and liturgical commemoration rather than by a later formal process of canonization.