Saint Lucy: light in the darkness of our time
By Roberto de Mattei | 11 December 2024
13 December is the feast of St Lucy, virgin and martyr. Lucy, patroness of Syracuse, is one of the three glories of Christian Sicily, along with St Agatha and St Rosalia, who shine respectively in Catania and Palermo. Her name has the honour of being united with that of Agatha, Agnes and Cecilia in the Canon of the Mass.
St Lucy was born in Syracuse around 283 AD to a noble and wealthy Christian family. Promised in marriage to a pagan, the young woman had consecrated herself to the Lord with a vow of virginity and refused the marriage. Her suitor then denounced her as a Christian to the prefect Pascasius. The prefect ordered her to sacrifice to the Roman gods, but Lucy refused to deny the one true God she worshipped. The acts of her martyrdom recount the tortures to which the magistrate subjected her. Threatened with being presented among prostitutes, she became so heavy that neither the strength of two oxen nor that of dozens of soldiers was able to move her. Lucy was then covered in oil and placed on a pyre, but the flames did not harm her. Finally, her head was cut off, or, according to Latin sources, a dagger thrust into her throat. She died prophesying the fall of the Christian persecutor Diocletian and peace for the Church, which would come a few years later with the advent of Constantine.
The body of St Lucy remained in Syracuse for many centuries, but in the twelfth century, after a number of dramatic incidents, it was brought to Venice, where it now rests, displayed for the veneration of the faithful in a glass case in the church of St Jeremiah and St Lucy.
The tradition relates that Lucy’s beautiful eyes were gouged out, but that they miraculously came back into place. This is why Lucy is depicted holding a tray with her eyes on it and is invoked to heal blindness. Lucy’s name comes from the Latin lux, meaning “light”, and symbolises the material light of the eyes, but above all the spiritual light of the soul. The soul in the state of grace shines with a vivid splendour, like a crystal globe illuminated by the sun, because it receives the lumen Christi — the divine light, which is Jesus Christ.
Dante Alighieri held St Lucy in “the highest veneration”, perhaps because, thanks to her intercession, he obtained healing from a serious eye disease that he mentions in the Convivio (III, IX,15).
In the second canto of the Inferno, Virgil reveals to Dante that the “three blessed women” who will guide him on his path to redemption are the poet’s beloved Beatrice, Saint Lucy and the Virgin Mary (Inferno, II, 75–120).
In the Purgatorio, Lucy, the woman with the “beautiful eyes”, personally descends from her “blessed place” in Paradise and, while Dante is sleeping, takes him gently in her arms and sets him in front of the entrance to Purgatory. The poet writes, “A woman came and said: I am Lucy; let me take this man who is asleep; so will I help him on his way.” (Purgatorio, IX, 57)
In the Paradiso, Lucy is placed in the “blessed court of heaven” next to St Peter, Anne, mother of the Virgin, Moses and St John the Evangelist (Paradiso, XXXII, 138).
According to one of Dante’s most observant commentators, Giuseppe Giacalone (1918–2006), who follows St Thomas Aquinas (in particular Summa Theologiae, II-II, 17), Lucy, in the Divine Comedy, represents hope, which enlightens the man lost in the darkness of sin and begins his journey of salvation and redemption.
The feast of St Lucy, which falls on 13 December, reminds us of two important historical events: 13 December 1294 was the day that saw the act of resignation of the papacy by Celestine V, after just four months of pontificate; 13 December 1545 was the opening day of the Council of Trent, which barred the road to the Protestant Revolution.
The number thirteen is significant in the context of the apparitions of Fatima, since Our Lady appeared to the three shepherd children every thirteenth day of the month, between May and October 1917, with an exception in August due to the arrest of the shepherd children. Lucy is also the name of the most famous of the Fatima visionaries, Lucia dos Santos (1907–2005), whose cause for beatification is underway, after the canonisation of her cousins Giacinta and Francisco Marto, which has already taken place.
On 13 December 1908, the great Brazilian thinker Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira was born in São Paulo, Brazil. His mother was called Lucilia Ribeiro dos Santos, and both mother and son died in the odour of sanctity. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira was an apostle of Fatima and fought for the restoration of Christian civilisation, a civilisation that, like the medieval one, allows itself to be illuminated by the divine light and shines in that light. “Intellectual light, full of love; love of true good, full of joy; joy that transcends all sweetness”, as Beatrice says in the Divine Comedy, referring to the Empyrean Heaven (Paradiso, XXX, 40–42).
Lux in tenebris lucet (Jn 1:5). In the days of Advent, the name of Lucy proclaims the divine Light that is approaching to wonderfully console the Church.
It is very sad that the official “mascot” of the Jubilee of 2025, called Luce — “Light”, is not St Lucy but, as one reads on the Vatican News website, “a little pilgrim girl created with the aesthetics of manga”, that is, an expression of “pop” subculture, bearing more resemblance to Greta Thunberg more than to the luminous saint of this name.
Therefore, in the intellectual and moral darkness of the present hour, let us pray to St Lucy in the words of Dom Guéranger:
“We turn to you, O Virgin Lucy, to obtain the grace to see in his humility Him whom you now contemplate in glory. Deign to take us under your powerful patronage. The name you have received means Light: therefore be our torch in the night that surrounds us. O lamp ever shining with the beauty of virginity, enlighten our eyes; heal the wounds that concupiscence has produced in them, so that they may be lifted up, above the creature, to that true Light which shines in the darkness, and which the darkness does not comprehend.”