St. Cecilia calls the prefect's power a bladder full of wind

ROME, 230 AD — According to longstanding Catholic Tradition, St. Cecilia was brought this year before the tribunal of Turcius Almachius, prefect of the city, on a charge that carried the death penalty. She answered nearly every question the prefect put to her by taking the question apart. Almachius could have her killed or let her walk out of the hearing, and at the end of it he condemned her to die in her own house.

St. Cecilia was a Roman noblewoman, tried in the reign of the emperor Alexander Severus, and everything told of her life comes through a single document, the account of her martyrdom written at Rome about the middle of the fifth century. What Almachius wanted from her was simple, and he said so more than once: that she sacrifice to the gods of the city, or say she was not a Christian. She gave him neither.

What brought her before Almachius was money. He had already tried her husband, St. Valerian, and his brother St. Tiburtius for burying the bodies of executed Christians, and had them beheaded four miles out along the Via Appia for refusing to sacrifice to Jupiter. Then he had St. Cecilia seized and asked her first of all where their property had gone. It had all been given to the poor, she said.

No statute governed a trial of this kind. A governor or a city prefect heard the case himself, and the questioning ran to a pattern: name, legal condition, then whether the defendant was a Christian. A defendant who sacrificed, or who simply said they were not a Christian, walked out. Pliny the Younger, governing Bithynia around 110 AD, told the emperor Trajan he released anyone who would curse Christ and offer wine and incense to the gods.

Almachius opened by asking her name. St. Cecilia gave it: “Cecilia — but that is among men; what is more illustrious is that I am a Christian.” The prefect asked next what her legal condition was, and she answered: “A Roman citizen, of illustrious and noble family.” Then Almachius asked her religion, adding a second question to the first. St. Cecilia did not answer it. She told Almachius that the question was badly put: “Then begannest thou thy demand foolishly, that wouldst have two answers in one demand.” Almachius asked where she got the presumption to answer him like that, and she said it came “of good conscience and faith not feigned” — words St. Paul wrote to Timothy.

So Almachius asked her whether she knew what power he had. “Thy power is little to dread,” she told him, “for it is like a bladder full of wind, which with the pricking of a needle is anon gone away and come to nought.”

Then he offered her the way out of the charge: sacrifice, or say she was not a Christian, and she could go free. Elige tibi unum e duobus: aut sacrifica, aut nega te Christianam esse (choose one of the two: either sacrifice, or deny that you are a Christian), he told her. She laughed, and answered: O iudicem necessitate confusum (what a judge, confounded by his own necessity). “He wants me to deny that I am innocent, so that he himself may make me guilty; he spares and he rages, he looks away and he takes notice. If you wish to condemn, why do you urge me to deny? If you wish to acquit, why will you not inquire?”

Almachius told her she had begun wrongly and was persisting in it, and he asked why she spoke with such pride. Then he named the authority behind the question: “knowest thou not how our princes have given me power to give life and to slay?” St. Cecilia answered the charge of pride first, and drew a distinction: “It is one thing to be proud and another to be constant: I have spoken constantly, not proudly.” Then she took the claim of power apart. “Now shall I prove thee a liar against the very truth,” she said. “Thou mayst well take the life from them that live, but to them that be dead, thou mayst give no life, therefore thou art a minister not of life, but of death.”

Almachius told her to put her madness aside and sacrifice to the gods. “I wot never where thou hast lost thy sight,” she said, “for them that thou sayest be gods we see them stones, put thine hand, and by touching thou shalt learn that which thou mayst not see with thine eyes.” What Almachius called gods, she told him, she and everyone else with working eyes saw to be stone, bronze and lead.

Almachius then condemned her to be suffocated in the bath of her own house, shut in the hot room with the furnace stoked seven times hotter than usual.

The oldest list of the Church’s martyr days, the Martyrologium Hieronymianum, names St. Cecilia alone under September 16. That is the day she was buried in the Catacomb of Callistus. Her feast is kept on November 22. At Matins of that feast the Church sings its verdict on the argument: “The Maiden Cecilia overcame Almachius, and called Tiburtius and Valerian to crowns.”