MOUNT Etna erupted a year after Saint Agatha’s death on 251 AD. The people of Catania, Sicily, were spared from torrents of burning sulphur and stones through her intercession.
The people took her veil from her tomb and carried it in a procession, according to Rev. Alban Butler in The Lives of The Fathers, Martyrs and Other Principal Saints.
The people “stood defiantly in the path of the oncoming lava praying” for her intercession. Miraculously, the lava “altered its course at the last minute,” narrates Malcolm Day in A Treasury of Saints, sparing the inhabitants from death and destruction. The failed invasion of the Turks in Malta in 1551 was also attributed to her. Her relics were distributed in many places as patroness of the island.
Honored in the Cannon of the Mass
Agatha, whose name means good woman in Greek, is one of the seven women, together with The Blessed Virgin Mary, who is honored in the Eucharistic Prayer in the Canon of the Mass. Born of a rich and illustrious family in 231, she was consecrated to God at an early age.
Quintianus, a Roman consul, desired her immensely, but she rejected his amorous offers.
Wikipedia records her refuge to Malta with friends during Emperor Decius persecution of Christians in 249 to 251. Historians believe that she spent her days in Rabat, inside a rock-hewn crypt praying and teaching Christian faith to children.
When she returned to Catania, Quintianus had her arrested, because to be a Christian was considered an offense. She was assigned to be with Aphrodisia, a wicked woman with six prostitute daughters.
Agatha prayed to preserve her purity. After a month she was released, but before Quintianus and the judge, she pledged her loyalty to God.
Offended, the judge sent her to prison. Arraigned at a tribunal, again she reiterated that “Jesus Christ was her life and salvation.” She was sentenced with being burned at the stake but an earthquake saved her so she was sent to prison, where her room was filled with light. Saint Peter the Apostle appeared and healed her wounds, narrates J.R. Stracke in Saint Agatha of Sicily.
Naked, flogged, roasted and breasts cut
Quintianus, unaffected by the miraculous cure of her wounds, had her stripped naked, torn with iron hoobs, flogged, rolled over live coals mixed with broken glasses, then her breasts were cut.
She died after reciting this prayer: “Lord, my Creator, you have taken me from the love of the world, and given me patience to suffer: Receive now my soul.” In 500 Pope Symmachus built a church in Rome to honor her. In 726 Gregory II built another church in her invocation, which Pope Clement VIII gave to the Christian Doctrine Convocation.
Buried at Badia di Santa Agata, Catania, she is the patron saint of Catania, Sicily, Malta, San Marino and Zamarramia in Segovia, Spain.
She is, likewise, the patron saint of nurses and women suffering from breast cancer.
She was declared saint by Saint Gregory I, The Great.
Sex-crazed generation
FR. Nil Guillemette in a homily-meditation on Agatha extolled her “sense of bodily and spiritual integrity—a solid respect for her physical boundary, a diamond—hard sense of having a unique self which deserves respect.”
In contrast with the global scene, prostitution, pornography, rape and other horrific and unimaginable assaults on both sexes are on the rise, sometimes with parental consent.
With the advance in technology, cyber pornography and sex exploitation have become not only a “cottage industry” but a multibillion-dollar business, according to British, Australian and US counterparts reporting about the 100,000 Filipino kids exploited in the UK, the US, police bust of local cybersex ring in news reports in 2014.
Fr. Shay Cullen of Preda since 1980 has fought child prostitution in the Philippines and provided information for the advocacy research of Terre des Homme Netherlands on child pornography, results of which made world headlines.
William Hague, the British foreign secretary, and Angelina Jolie, special envoy of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, state that “rape is used as a deliberate military tactic to achieve political objectives…drive out or subjugate a different ethnic grouping or to terrorize a community into submission, and even used to infect women with HIV or injure them so badly that they are unable to bear children.”
In “Stop War Zone Rape and Sexual Violence,” a commentary that appeared in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on September 20, 2013, it lamented that the “crux of the problem is an ingrained culture of impunity, where for tens of thousands rapes in any one country, there have only been a handful of persecution.”
To Agatha, to preserve honor, she chose to die a horrible death.
Father Guillemette said the virgin martyr conveys the message that “she is not a sex object but a person, something our sex-crazed generation has unfortunately forgotten.” Her feast day is on February 5.
Santiago is a former regional director of the Department of Education-National Capital Region. She is currently a faculty member of Mater Redemptoris College, Laguna.
Image credits: Wikimedia Commons