This week we celebrate
the Feast of...
St. Lucy
(Dec. 13)
If you’ve ever seen a statue or picture of a young woman holding a plate on which rests two eyeballs, that would be St. Lucy. (Do an online image search for “St. Lucy” if you want in on this one.) Her life is not historically verifiable, yet she is mentioned in the Canon of the Mass and celebrated as a symbol of light in the darkness. She is also the patron of many eye conditions.
Butler’s Lives of the Saints situates Lucy as being born in Syracuse, Sicily, to a wealthy nobleman and his wife. Her story contains a miracle; as a young woman, Lucy is said to have gone with her mother to the tomb of St. Agatha to pray for her mother’s healing from a hemorrhage. As they prayed, her mother was healed, and in gratitude, Lucy vowed to remain a virgin. This did not sit well with the young man to whom she had been engaged at an early age, however, and he exposed her as a Christian to the Roman governor. The year was ad 304, the height of the persecutions of Diocletian.
Lucy was at first sentenced to prostitution and ordered to be taken to a brothel. Here legend tells that she was struck immovable, so much so that even when she was fastened to a team of oxen she could not be moved. A fire was then built around her and lit, but Lucy was not harmed. Finally, a soldier took his sword and pierced her in the throat; even then, she prophesied against her persecutor until she died. (Some accounts of her life have her surviving the throat-piercing and dying only after she was beheaded.)
There are a number of stories that account for the depiction of Lucy with her eyes on the plate. One says that her eyes, of a remarkable beauty, were gouged out by her persecutors; another that they were extracted by her fiancé. There is also a story that claims Lucy took out her own eyes so that they could not be admired by potential suitors. In any case, each of the stories notes that God restored her eyes to be even more beautiful than before. (This explains the fact that in depictions of St. Lucy holding the plate with eyeballs on them, her face is shown with eyes intact.)
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