Saint Agatha stops a volcano from destroying the city of Catania

Synthèse :

Remembering attitudes in the pre-Christian Roman Empire

The first thing to remember is the mentalities in the pre-Christian Roman Empire. We have forgotten the extent to which attitudes changed when Emperor Theodosius declared that the Empire was henceforth Christian (392).

At the time of Saint Agatha, the Roman army was an invincible power and an instrument of imperial domination, conquering territories in order to extract lucrative taxes. This practice of warfare provided not only a host of slaves to keep the economic machine running, but also great wealth to enable a society of leisure for its citizens.

For leisure, there were stadiums, not to play athletic games as we do today, but where shows were organised with real physical battles, sometimes to the death, and where condemned men were executed by re-enacting scenes from mythology.

As far as young girls were concerned, patriarchal customs meant that they went from being dependent on their fathers, under the law, to being dependent on their husbands. This last point explains the story of Saint Agatha.

Saint Agatha, coveted for her beauty and her money

It was in this ancient world, which Christianity had begun to transform, that little Agatha was born in the town of Catania in Sicily. She came from a rich and noble family, and was of great beauty. Filled with the grace of Christ, young Agatha decided at the age of fifteen to consecrate her life to God in prayer and virginity. In doing so, she imitated the mother of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, whose evangelical advice she followed.

A certain Quintianus, governor of Sicily, noticed her and promised to take her to bed, or even marry her, for two reasons: the prospect of benefiting from her physical beauty, and the possibility of a rich inheritance.

Saint Agatha, canonised as a virgin and yet probably raped

Agathe firmly refused him: there was no question of her marrying him. He soon realised that she was a Christian, but at first he did not denounce her as such. He was a magistrate and therefore has the power of life and death over her, since Christianity was illegal. He had instead this plan in mind: confident that he knew human nature and could make Agatha change her mind, he sent her to live in the brothel of a certain Aphrodisia, his accomplice, who  promised to "teach Agathe how to live" if he was willing to entrust her to his care for a while: "Threats or caresses will make her give in and the only thing left to do is to teach her the techniques of sex" . All this was necessarily done with the complicity of Agatha's father, or at least his silence, which can be explained by fear.

Agatha found herself locked up in this brothel. We don't have a detailed account of what happened to her, but we do know that she was proclaimed by the Church "patron saint of those who suffer rape", which is significant. Yet she was canonised as a virgin, which proves that she resisted. She was not the only one: a few years later, Saint Lucy, another little Sicilian girl, was also raped and canonised as a virgin and martyr. In fact, Agatha and Lucy are mentioned at the same time in the Mass of the Roman canon, which is fitting, because Lucy went to pray at her tomb.

In the Golden Legend (written in the Middle Ages by Blessed Jacobus de Voragine), she is quoted as saying to Aphrodisia: "My will rests on a rock and has Jesus Christ as its foundation. Your words are like the wind; your promises are like rain; the terrors you inspire in me are like a stream: whatever your efforts, the foundations of the house remain solid and nothing can shake them." The text makes it clear that the emotion she felt when she said these words was not pride: she pronounced these words weeping, a fact that testifies to the martyrdom she was experiencing in this house. After a few weeks, and despite her best efforts, the brothel keeper gave up and told Quintianus: "It's as impossible to make her give in as it is to melt a stone. She's stubborn. She'll never budge."

The martyrdom of Saint Agatha

Quintianus became very angry and decided to use his judicial power to break Agatha. He had the opportunity to do so, since it was the time of the persecution of Christians by the emperor Decius. Since Agatha was guilty of professing the Christian faith, he could bring her before his court. Everything went according to plan. During the trial, he asked her for her identity. She replied: "I'm from a noble family, an illustrious family, and my parentage proves it. - So if you are from a patrician family, how come you behave like a servant? - I am the servant of our Lord Jesus Christ".

He then asked her to sacrifice to the gods. She replied with great irony: "Your wife resembles the goddess Venus, whom you worship, and you, how much you resemble your god Jupiter!"Feeling mocked, he ordered a guard to slap her. Undismayed, she answered back and said:

"How can you honour Venus, whose behaviour you wouldn't want your wife to imitate for a second? How can you honour Jupiter, whose behaviour in mythology shames you? - Let's stop talking! Sacrifice to the gods or die! - Even if you put me in the circus with the beasts, it would be a sweet death for me, because I know that the Lord is with me and will protect me. If you inflict any kind of torture on me, know that the Holy Spirit will be with me, he who moves and bears heaven."

Seeing that her determination was unshakeable, the consul decided to move on to physical torture. First, he had her thrown into prison to soften her resistance. The next day, she was subjected to the rack. Then the executioners attacked her breasts and tore them apart with pliers. Since then, Italian mothers have prayed to Saint Agatha when they are breastfeeding and experiencing pain. After this first session of torture, her body was nothing but sores and pain. Quintianus decided to lock her up again and let the infection take its course.

In this prison, a miracle happened during the night. A great light came on - a light so strong that the guards fled - and she saw Saint Peter: he was preceded by a child carrying a torch and various medicines. This is how it was explained that no infection had affected her body. Jacobus de Voragine recounts a conversation she had with Saint Peter: "My body has been so terribly torn that no one will be able to conceive of any pleasure for it, but I thank you for taking an interest in me and coming to visit me in this way." The next day, Agatha found that she was cured and, above all, that her soul had regained the strength it needed. This, by the grace of God, explains the extraordinary resistance she showed until her death.

Four days later, Quintianus summoned her again, expecting to see her broken and begging. He asked her to worship the Roman gods, and she replied: "Your words are foolish and vain. Why do you want me to worship stones when the God of Heaven has just healed me?" Quintianus was therefore defeated and, enraged by her resistance, said: "We'll see if your God will heal you this time." He ordered that she be executed in a horrible way, namely by fire. Judge Quintianus died some time later: he owned some horses and, as he was making an inventory of his possessions, a horse took the bit, ran and, with a kick, threw him into the river. His body was never found.

The conversion of Sicily

A legend from the Middle Ages recounts that at the time of Agatha's death, Mount Etna erupted. There was a violent earthquake. Houses collapsed and two of Consul Quintianus's aides perished. Faithful Christians managed to recover the remains of Saint Agatha and buried them with honour and discretion. A few days later, a marble plaque engraved with the following words was found on her tomb: "To our generous saint, honour of God and liberator of the homeland."

The people of Catania made her the protector of their city, even though the times were still pagan. A year after her death, Mount Etna erupted violently and lava began to flow from the volcano towards the city. Spontaneously, people from the town went to her tomb, which was covered by a cloth. They placed it in front of the approaching lava, and it stopped. Since that day, Saint Agatha has been invoked to protect people from the dangers of volcanoes and fires.

Saint Agatha's reputation for granting powerful miracles spread throughout pagan Sicily. So it should come as no surprise that fifty years later, during Diocletian's persecution, another young girl called Lucy, who was also in danger of being executed as a Christian, first went to Agatha's tomb to confide in her.

When the Roman Empire became Christian in 313 AD, the clergy non-violently suppressed the ancient cult of the goddess Isis, which existed in Sicily, and had it peacefully replaced by the cult of Saint Agatha. Thus, even after her death, the patroness of Sicily was the source of the evangelisation of an entire country.

Au-delà des raisons d'y croire :

The story of Saint Agatha is an old one, but similar heroism can be found in the lives of many young Christian women in the nineteenth or twentieth century in new Christian countries such as Korea, Japan or China, where the political authorities behaved in a similar way to those of the Roman Empire.

Take, for example, the story told by Maria Winowska (Les Voleurs de Dieu, Éditions Saint-Paul, Paris, 1966) of the Chinese girl who was martyred for her love of the Eucharist during the Cultural Revolution under Mao (1966-1976). Or the martyrdom of Saint Hermine of Jesus and her companions, virgins, in China (1864-1900). All of them have been canonised: Saint Marie-Hermine de Jésus (Irma Grivot), Saint Marie-Amandine (Pauline Jeuris), Saint Marie de la Paix (Marie-Anne Giuliani), Saint Marie-Ciara (Clelia Nanetti), Saint Marie de Saint-Just (Anne-Françoise Moreau), Saint Marie-Adolphine (Kaatje Dierkx), and more.

Aller plus loin :

Arnaud Dumouch's video: "Saint Agatha, virgin and martyr, patron saint of victims of rape and torture"

En savoir plus :

• The short biography proposed by the Vatican News website: " Saint Agatha, virgin and martyr of Catania ".
• To understand hope, a theological virtue and source of courage, watch Arnaud Dumouch's videos: "Is hope different from hope?" and " Is hope a theological virtue?
• Video account of the life of Saint Agathe and the importance of her cult in France, by Marie-Claude Latimier, hagiographer.