St. Agatha tells St. Lucy her own faith has healed her mother

CATANIA, Sicily, 301 AD — Saint Lucy of Syracuse went to the tomb of Saint Agatha at Catania in 301 AD to pray for her mother, who had been bleeding for four years. According to longstanding Catholic Tradition, as the Acts of St. Lucy set it down in Sicily in the fifth century, St. Agatha appeared to St. Lucy there in a vision. St. Agatha told her that the cure was already hers to give, and her mother was healed. St. Lucy used the moment to ask her mother to release her from the marriage her mother wanted for her.

St. Lucy was a Christian girl from a noble family of Syracuse, on the east coast of Sicily. Her father had died when she was a child, and her mother, Eutychia, managed the inheritance he left. While still very young, St. Lucy had made a vow to Christ never to marry, and she had not told her mother. Then a young man of a noble Syracusan family, who was not a Christian, asked to marry her. Eutychia thought it a good match and urged her daughter to accept him. St. Lucy kept finding reasons to put the wedding off. Eutychia wanted her daughter married, and St. Lucy wanted to give her life to God and her goods to the poor. Eutychia had arranged the match, and Eutychia held the money.

Eutychia had tried doctors and costly treatments, and nothing had stopped the bleeding. Less than fifty miles away at Catania lay the relics of St. Agatha, a young woman put to death there in the persecution of the emperor Decius. Crowds came to her tomb, and many miracles had been worked through her intercession. St. Lucy persuaded her mother to make the journey.

At the Mass at the tomb, the Gospel was the story of the woman healed of a flow of blood by touching the hem of Christ’s garment. As soon as she heard the reading, St. Lucy turned to her mother. William Caxton’s English translation of the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century collection of saints’ lives, appeared in 1483 AD. In his version, where “guerished” means healed and “anon” means at once, St. Lucy said: “Mother, if ye believe that this which is read be true, and also that St. Agatha hath now presently with her Jesu Christ, and also that for his name she suffered martyrdom, and if ye, with this belief, touch her sepulchre, without doubt ye shall be anon guerished and healed.”

After Mass, when the people had gone, the two women knelt at the grave and prayed, weeping. St. Lucy prayed for her mother’s cure and for permission to give her own life to God. She fell asleep praying, and in her sleep she saw St. Agatha standing among the angels, richly adorned with jewels.

In Caxton’s version, St. Agatha said to her: “Lucy, my sweet sister, devout virgin to God, wherefore prayest thou to me for thy mother, for such thing as thou mayest thyself right soon give to her?” St. Agatha then gave her reason: “For I tell thee for truth, that for thy faith, and thy good, thy mother is safe and whole.” In another telling of the Acts, St. Agatha also speaks of the vow that Eutychia knew nothing about: Christ, St. Agatha tells St. Lucy, “is pleased that you should keep your virginity intact.”

St. Lucy woke frightened and told her mother: “Mother, ye be guerished and all whole; I pray you for her sake by whose prayers ye be healed, that ye never make mention to me for to take an husband.” In the same breath St. Lucy asked for the dowry: “all that good that ye would give me with a man, I pray you that ye will give it to me for to do alms withal that I may come to my saviour Jesu Christ.”

Eutychia did not refuse outright. She said that in the nine years since St. Lucy’s father died she had not spent the inheritance but added to it. Eutychia asked her daughter to wait until she had died, and then St. Lucy could do as she liked with the money.

After they returned to Syracuse, St. Lucy kept pressing her mother to give the money away while Eutychia was still alive. St. Lucy told her: “That which thou givest when thou shalt die, thou givest it because thou mayest not bear it with thee. Give then for God’s sake whiles thou livest.” Mother and daughter gave alms every day after that, until they had sold almost all of the inheritance and the family jewels.