St. Lucy

St. Lucy was a young Christian woman of Syracuse in Sicily who was martyred around the year 304, during the great persecution under the emperor Diocletian. The historical record of her life is thin, but her veneration is both ancient and certain: a fourth-century inscription in the catacombs of Syracuse attests to devotion at her tomb by around the year 400, and her name was inscribed in the Roman Canon of the Mass, where it is still spoken today. Hagiographical accounts relate that Lucy consecrated her virginity to Christ and gave her dowry to the poor, and that a rejected suitor denounced her as a Christian to the Roman authorities. According to these traditions she withstood threats and torture, dying by the sword when other attempts to harm her failed. The later legend that her eyes were taken from her, and miraculously restored, arose in the Middle Ages; it explains why art depicts her carrying her eyes on a dish and why she is invoked as patroness of the blind and of those with eye disorders. Her name, from the Latin lux, means "light," and her feast on December 13 — which fell near the winter solstice under the old calendar — has long been celebrated as a festival of light in the darkness of Advent. Devotion to her spread far beyond Sicily; in Scandinavia, St. Lucia's Day is still kept with processions of children wearing crowns of candles. Lucy's relics, moved from Syracuse centuries ago, are venerated today in the church of San Geremia in Venice, and her memory endures as one of the most beloved of the early virgin martyrs, a witness that the light of faith cannot be extinguished by violence.