St. Sophia buries her three martyred daughters and dies at their grave

ESCHAU, Alsace, October 1, 2026 AD — Bishop Remigius of Strasbourg carried the body of Saint Sophia on his shoulders from Rome to an island in Alsace in 777 AD and buried it in the abbey he had built for nuns on the island. He wrote in his will that he had done it. The Church kept St. Sophia’s feast this week, on September 30. The Roman Martyrology’s entry for that day lists her among the saints of Rome as “St. Sophia, widow, mother of the holy virgins Faith, Hope, and Charity.”

Tradition holds that St. Sophia was a Christian widow, born in Italy. She brought up her daughters, St. Faith, St. Hope and St. Charity, to love Christ, and the four of them made no secret of their faith. The girls were twelve, ten and nine. An official named Antiochus denounced the family to the Emperor Hadrian, who ordered them brought to Rome. The emperor wanted one thing from the girls, a sacrifice to the goddess Artemis. He could have them tortured and killed for refusing, and their mother could do nothing for them except urge them to endure it.

Mother and daughters came before the emperor together. The girls had prayed beforehand for the strength not to be afraid of torture and death. Everyone in the court was amazed at how calm the four of them were: the mother and her daughters looked as if they had been brought to a celebration. The emperor called the sisters up one at a time, and each refused. He ordered them tortured, and St. Sophia was forced to watch. In front of her the girls were burned over an iron grating, thrown into a red-hot oven and then into a cauldron of boiling tar. None of it killed them, because the Lord preserved them. The youngest, St. Charity, was tied to a wheel and beaten with rods until her body was covered in bloody welts. St. Sophia kept her courage and told her daughters to bear it for Christ, their Bridegroom in heaven. Then all three girls were beheaded, and they went to their deaths with joy.

The emperor let St. Sophia take the bodies, meaning to make her suffering worse. She laid her daughters in coffins, loaded the coffins on a wagon, drove out past the city limits and buried them on a high hill. She sat beside the graves for three days and died there. Christians buried her next to her daughters.

The Churches of the Byzantine rite celebrate St. Sophia together with her daughters on September 17 and honour her as a martyr. The Byzantine life of the four says of her: “Even though she did not suffer for Christ in the flesh, she was not deprived of a martyr’s crown. Instead, she suffered in her heart.”

At Rome, the tomb of the mother and her daughters was in a crypt beneath a church, and pilgrims visited it for a long time. About 770 AD Bishop Remigius built an abbey for Benedictine nuns on Eschau, an island between the Rhine and the Ill in Alsace.

Remigius went to Rome as a pilgrim, and there Pope Hadrian I gave him St. Sophia’s body. Remigius wrote afterwards that he carried it from Rome to Alsace in person, super humeros meos (on my shoulders), with his attendants and with great ceremony. The body reached Eschau on May 10, 777 AD. He buried it in the church he had built on the island, dedicated the abbey to St. Sophia and made her its patroness.

Ten months later, on March 15, 778 AD, Remigius made his will at Strasbourg. In it he called himself a sinner and a bishop, and for the good of his soul he left the island and its church to the Blessed Virgin Mary and her cathedral at Strasbourg. He addressed the Blessed Virgin as his heir and told her: tibi dono corpus sanctae Sophiae (to you I give the body of St. Sophia). He asked to be buried in the crypt he had built, and he was buried at Eschau.

Later Tradition at Eschau held that the relics of St. Sophia’s three daughters had come from Rome with hers, and the diocese of Strasbourg celebrated May 10 as the day all four were brought to Alsace. Pilgrims came to the abbey for the mother and her daughters all through the Middle Ages, and in 1143 AD the abbess and the bishop of Strasbourg founded a pilgrims’ hospital at Eschau. About 1350 AD the relics of St. Sophia and her three daughters were placed together in one Gothic sarcophagus. St. Sophia’s relics rest in the church at Eschau, the only part of the abbey still standing.