Saint Lucy

However, the report of the miracles that were continually taking place in Catania, at the tomb of Sain sainte Agathe Patron saint of the monastery of Crépy. t Agatha, spread so widely throughout all of Sicily that people went there from everywhere, and even the pagans flocked there to be helped in their infirmities. Thus, Eutychia and our Saint resolved to make a journey there to implore the assistance of this great Saint, illustrious for so many wonders. While they were there, the Gospel of the woman troubled by the issue of blood who was healed by touching the robe of Our Lord was read; this example caused Saint Lucy to conceive a firm hope that her mother would be relieved by touching the tomb of the virgin of Jesus Christ. She therefore begged her to remain there for some time in prayer; and, indeed, after all the people had withdrawn, they both prostrated themselves before this precious sepulcher and began to solicit the goodness of God with many groans and tears, through the intercession of this powerful advocate of the unfortunate.

As the prayer lasted a long time, Lucy was surprised by a sweet sleep, during which Saint Agatha appeared to her surrounded by a troop of angels, all covered in diamonds and precious pearls, and said to her: "Lucy, my dearest sister, virgin consecrated to God, why do you ask me for what you can yourself obtain immediately for your mother? Know that your faith has merited her health, and that, just as Jesus Christ has made the city of Catania famous in consideration of me, He will also make that of Syracuse radiant a nd glori Syracuse Birthplace of the saint. ous through you, because you have prepared for Him a dwelling perfectly pleasing in your virginal purity." Lucy awoke at these words, and, turning to Eutychia: "You are healed, my mother," she said to her, "and God, through the merits of His Spouse, has granted you perfect health; but grant me also another grace, to speak to me no more of marriage and to leave me the freedom to give myself entirely to my divine Spouse." Eutychia having yielded to her desire, she added: "I beg you therefore also, my mother, to give me the goods that were to serve as my dowry, so that I may employ them for the relief of the poor who are the members of Him who possesses all my heart." — "You know, my daughter," replied Eutychia, "that since your father died nine years ago, I have increased rather than diminished the goods he left you; I will give them all to you and you will dispose of them as you please; as for those that belong to me, I am quite happy to keep them as long as I am alive, and when you have closed my eyes you will be the mistress of them as well." Lucy showed her thereupon that it was not doing much for God to give Him only what one can no longer retain, and that, if she wished to show Him love, she should make a sacrifice of them during her life and not wait until her last hour, when her alms could only appear forced.

Eutychia allowed herself to be won over by this remonstrance, and, when they had returned to Syracuse, they both began to make great distributions of their wealth to the poor. Sometimes they sold precious stones, sometimes precious furnishings, sometimes good inheritances, and all the proceeds were used to ransom captives, to deliver prisoners, to assist widows and orphans, and to provide for all kinds of needy people. The young nobleman to whom Lucy had been betrothed, very irritated by this conduct, went immediately to make his complaints to Paschasius, the prefect of the city, a nd told Paschase Archbishop of Vienne who ordained Maximus as a priest. him that this dissipation came from the fact that Lucy, who was to be his wife, had allowed herself to be drawn into the superstitions of Christianity. This judge sent for her to be arrested at that very hour, and, when she was before his tribunal, he spared nothing to persuade her to offer a sacrifice to his gods. "The holy and perfect sacrifice that we must offer," Lucy said to him, "is to visit widows and orphans and to assist the unfortunate in their needs. For three years I have been offering this sacrifice to the living God, and there remains for me only to sacrifice myself to Him as a victim who is owed to His divine majesty." — "Say that to the Christians," replied Paschasius, "and not to me, who am obliged to keep the edicts of the emperors my masters." — "You wish," replied Lucy, "to keep the laws of the princes of the earth, I wish to keep the commandments of the King of heaven. You fear the severity of your sovereigns, and I fear the justice of my God; you do not wish to offend the emperors, I do not wish to irritate Him who holds in His hands the keys of life and death. You strive to please mortal men, and I fear nothing so much as to displease Jesus Christ, who is an all-powerful and immortal God. Do whatever you please; as for me, I will do what I know to be most advantageous for my salvation."

Paschasius then reproached her for having dissipated her great wealth with her lovers. But the Saint showed him, through an excellent discourse, that she had no other lover than her Savior, and that she had always protected herself from the snares of those who corrupt the soul and the body. This judge, unable to endure the wisdom of her replies, then said to her: "You will not speak so much when we come to blows." — "Words," replied Lucy, "cannot fail those to whom Jesus Christ has given this lesson: When you are brought before kings and presidents, do not trouble yourselves to foresee what you will say or what you will answer them; for then you will be given what you are to say, and it is not properly you who will speak, but the Holy Spirit who will speak through you." — "You believe, then," said Paschasius, "that the Holy Spirit is in you, and that it is He who provides you with the speeches you make?" — "What I believe," replied the Saint, "is that those who live chastely are the temples of the Holy Spirit." — "Well!" said the prefect, "I will have you taken to an infamous place, where you will lose your chastity, so that the Holy Spirit will abandon you and you will cease to be His temple." — "He will not abandon me for that," added Lucy, "because the external violence that is done to the body does not take away the purity of the soul; it increases it, on the contrary, and makes it worthy of a double reward."

The tyrant, in a fury, ordered the executioners to take this innocent girl and drag her by force to a room where all the libertines of the city had permission to abuse her. But what can the power of men, or even of the demon, do against a treasure that the power of God wishes to preserve? The Holy Spirit rendered Lucy so firm and so immobile in the place where she was, that neither the executioners who had orders to remove her, nor a greater number of officers who employed all their strength to do so, until they were sweating in great drops, nor several pairs of oxen to which she was attached with ropes, could ever make her move. One cannot express the shame and confusion of Paschasius when he saw this marvelous prodigy; however, being in no way changed by it, he had a great brazier set up around the Saint, and had her coated with pitch, resin, and boiling oil, so that the fire would consume her in an instant. But her Spouse preserved her still in the midst of the flames, without any injury, just as He once preserved three of His servants in the furnace of Babylon. This caused the executioners to torment her in many other ways, and finally, they pierced her throat with a sword stroke. She did not, however, die immediately; she had time to speak familiarly to the faithful who came to receive her last sighs. She predicted to them the end of the persecution and the long peace that the Church would enjoy after the death of Diocletian and Maximian, and under the empire of Constantine the Great. She assure d them that their c Constantin le Grand Roman emperor whose conversion ended Christian persecutions. ity was going to be illustrious through the glory of her martyrdom, just as Catania was by the triumphs that Saint Agatha had won over idolatry. Finally, it is said that she even received the holy Viaticum from the hands of the priests who were in the city. Thus, being already crowned with the merit of so many alms, sufferings, and holy actions, she rendered her spirit to God, to receive the crown of a glory that will never end. This was on December 13, 303.

Saint Lucy of Syracuse is represented: 1° praying for her mother's healing at the tomb of Saint Agatha: the latter appears to her; 2° carrying two eyes on her hand or on a platter. This characteristic, reproduced in a multitude of paintings and prints, would seem to indicate that the executioners tore the eyes from our Martyr; but nothing in the history of Saint Lucy of Syracuse alludes to such a torture. Perhaps the solution to this problem should be sought in a simple play on words.

As our Saint's name expresses the idea of Light, she has been invoked for diseases of the sight (hence the name 'Saint Lucy's water' given to a remedy believed to cure eye ailments). However, according to others, the martyr of Syracuse may have benefited from an event belonging to the life of another Lucy (Saint Lucy the Chaste), of whom it is said that, seeing herself frequently followed by a young man who affected to accompany her everywhere as soon as she left her house, she finally asked him what attached him so strongly to her steps: the latter having replied that it was the beauty of her eyes, the young girl removed them from their sockets and told her pursuer that he could take them and cease his importunities; 3° pulled by oxen that strive in vain to make her move; 4° with a dagger through her neck; 5° with three crowns in her hand (that of nobility, that of virginity, and that of martyrdom, probably); 6° in a group, with the most illustrious virgins of the first centuries: Thecla, Agnes, Catherine, Agatha, Martha, Barbara.

Saint Lucy is the patron saint of Syracuse; she is invoked against eye ailments, flux of blood, dysentery, and any kind of hemorrhages; and for plowmen.

## CULT AND RELICS.

Her body was buried in Syracuse, the place of her martyrdom, and, as soon as peace was restored to the Church, two sanctuaries were raised in her honor: one in the city, where her precious remains were placed and which was the most common site of her miracles; the other, outside the city, at the spot where she had endured so many torments. The Roman Breviary asserts that her sacred bones were later transferred to Constantinople and that, from there, they were brought to Venice. But this must be understood as referring at most to a portion; for we learn from the History of the Bishop s of Metz City where the saint received his theological training. Metz, drawn from Sigebert of Gembloux, that, in the 7th century, Farnold, Duke of Spoleto, having made himself master of Sicily with the help of the arms of Liutprand, King of the Lombards, had the body of Saint Lucy removed from Syracuse to enrich the city of Corsino in his duchy; that this rich deposit remained there for a very long time; but finally that Thierry, the forty-seventh Bishop of Metz, having gone to Italy with the Emperor Otto I, his cousin, obtained through him a multitude of relics, with which he enriched the Abbey o abbaye de Saint-Vincent Abbey founded by Bishop Thierry where the relics of Lucy were deposited. f Saint-Vincent, which he had founded in 968. He obtained in particular the body of Saint Lucy, which he sent to be received at Corfu (970) and which he deposited in an oratory of the new church of Saint-Vincent, which he solemnly dedicated in 972. Sigebert of Gembloux, who lived for a long time in the Abbey of Saint-Vincent, left us the account of this translation. He also composed three writings in praise of Saint Lucy. The first, in Alcaic verse, contained the acts of her martyrdom; the second was a defense of the prediction in which Saint Lucy announced the days of peace that were to come for the Church at the advent of Constantine; finally, the third writing was a discourse in praise of Saint Lucy.

In 1042, Emperor Henry III asked Thierry II, Bishop of Metz, for some relics of Saint Lucy for the Abbey of Liutbourg (former Diocese of Speyer), which his father Conrad the Salic had founded. The prelate donated an arm of the illustrious Martyr to the abbey, the translation of which he performed himself.

Poppo, Bishop of Metz, placed the relics of Saint Lucy in 1094 into a shrine much richer than the one in which they had rested. In the reconstruction of the abbey church of Saint-Vincent in the 13th century, a monument that still commands admiration for its beautiful and elegant proportions, a distinguished place was reserved for the illustrious virgin and martyr of Syracuse; it is there that she received for several centuries the homage of the people of Metz, who daily brought their vows and offerings to her altar. She was invoked especially for eye ailments: the faithful, in their simple and trusting faith, would wash their eyes with dust collected from the pillars that supported the shrine, which they would mix with a little water. The author of the General Chronicles of the Order of Saint Benedict asserts that a great number of miracles occurred at the Saint's sanctuary.

The church of Saint-Vincent is today deprived of the sacred relic, which was for so long its most precious treasure. But, by a rare and consoling exception, the body of the illustrious virgin was saved by pious hands from the sacrilegious fury of the revolutionaries. Count d'Homilstein, having become its fortunate owner, donated it to the church of Ottange (Moselle), where i Ottange Commune in Moselle that currently possesses the body of Saint Lucy. t rests today. Every year, on December 13, there is a great gathering of foreigners at the shrine of Saint Lucy. Many go to confession and approach the Holy Table.

LIVES OF THE SAINTS. — VOLUME XIV.

The church of Ottange possesses almost the entire body of Saint Lucy, though largely reduced to dust. One must, however, except an arm that the Republic of Venice obtained from Constantinople and which appears to have been separated from it long before the translation that took place in 976. One must also except the arm transferred to the Abbey of Liutbourg by Thierry II. As for the authenticity of this precious deposit, no well-founded doubts can be raised against it. It is attested by a multitude of testimonies, notably by the letters patent issued by Emperor Charles IV, and by the report drawn up by Menrisse, Bishop of Madoune and suffragan of the Bishop of Metz, Henri de Bourbon. A portion of the old official records is still in our possession. Mgr Dupont des Loges, Bishop of Metz, struck by all the marks of authenticity with which this sacred deposit is invested, declared himself, during a visit he made to Ottange, "that he had found nothing in his entire diocese more authentic."

The parish priest of Saint-Vincent is preparing to restore the cult of Saint Lucy in his church. A portion of the relics of the illustrious Martyr has been promised to him, and it will soon, we hope, return to take possession of the sanctuary where it received the homage and vows of the people of Metz for several centuries. A beautiful stained-glass window already traces her chaste and heroic image for the eyes of the faithful.

We have completed this account with Notes provided by Father Noel, of the Diocese of Metz, and the Characteristics of the Saints by Father Cahier.