Saint Lucy

If you go to Saint Michael, the church on 9th street, you will see this statue, one of the more eerie and gruesome images in the Catholic Church. It is the image of Saint Lucy (Saint Lucia), a copy, one of thousands likely, of a Renaissance statue. St. Lucy, a Virgin and Martyr, lived 283 AD to 304 AD. She is Venerated in the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Churches, the Anglican Communion and the Lutheran Church, which is kind of rare for a Canonized Saint from Italy. Her is name derived from lucis, which means "light" and she is the patron saint of those who are blind as well as ophthalmologists. Notice the eyes on the plate.

Here’s the tale: Sicilian born, her Roman father died when she was young, leaving her and Eutychia, her mother without a protecting guardian. Eutychia suffered four years with dysentery but Lucy had heard the renown of Saint Agatha, the patroness of Catania, which is in Sicily, where St. Lucy lived. According to one account: "and when they were at a Mass, one read a gospel that made mention of a woman who was healed of the dysentery by touching of the hem of the coat of Jesus Christ, which convinced her mother to pray together at Saint Agatha's tomb. They stayed up all night praying, until they fell asleep, exhausted. Saint Agatha appeared in a vision to Lucy and said, ‘Soon you shall be the glory of Syracuse, as I am of Catania.’ At that instant Eutychiaea was cured.”

Now, here is where it gets weird. A marriage had been arranged for Lucy with a pagan bridegroom, but Lucy wanted to remain a virgin, devote her life to God, and urged her mother to distribute her dowry to the poor. The mother, having been cured by divine intervention, could not refuse. The rejected pagan bridegroom denounced Lucy as a Christian to the magistrate Paschasius. He first ordered her to burn a sacrifice to the emperor's image.

Lucy refused: "I offer to Him myself, let Him do with His offering as it pleases Him."

So, Paschasius ordered her to be defiled in a brothel. Catholicism can have some pretty weird stuff regarding sexuality, especially when it comes to the tales of the Saints. But back then, a woman’s physical virginity was political. Daughters were given with dowries, and the bloody sheets after the honeymoon was a sign that a contract was kept. This part of the St. Lucy story should be seen in that context; the woman had defied the authorities, and the punishment was that she would be an outcast, could never be wed to her class, which apparently was one of wealth and power—the father being a Roman, after all.

The quote by St. Lucy that is recorded reflects an interesting discourse on body and soul. “No one's body is polluted so as to endanger the soul if it has not pleased the mind. If you were to lift my hand to your idol and so make me offer against my will, I would still be guiltless in the sight of the true God, who judges according to the will and knows all things. If now, against my will, you cause me to be polluted, a twofold purity will be gloriously imputed to me. You cannot bend my will to your purpose; whatever you do to my body, that cannot happen to me.”

The following is from a Catholic Encyclopedia: “The Christian tradition states that when the guards came to take her away they found her so filled with the Holy Spirit that she was as stiff and heavy as a mountain; they could not move her even when they hitched her to a team of oxen. Even after implanting a dagger through her throat she prophesied against her persecutor. As a final torture, her eyes were gouged out. She was miraculously still able to see without her eyes.” That is why, Lucy is shown holding her eyes on a plate, and yet still has eyes in her head. The sword is the dagger, which seems to have been the cause of death. If you look at the base, there is a psalm which indicates a martyrdom, I think that is usually the case.

Here is some other stuff: Although St. Lucy is a Sicilian saint, her feast day, December 13th is popular in Northern Italy, and apparently is beloved in Scandinavia, where there are special celebrations in the home, where the daughter fixes a special breakfast for her family wearing a white dress with a red sash. There special torch lit processions throughout many nations in Europe, including Sweden and Italy. Some accounts I have read compare the saint to pagan beliefs of a goddess of light without eyes. We all know that a lot of Christian practices have a basis in pagan rituals; on the other hand there is an impressive amount of documentation on Saint Lucy and this period of Pagan Rome. I see no reason to doubt that she was a real life historical person.

I was also impressed with the wide celebration of the Saint. You have to remember, Italy was not exactly a nation back then and even today, there are conflicts between the South and the North. Many in the North considered themselves Germanic—like Scandinavians—where the Southerners identify themselves as Latin. I imagine during the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, as a way to unify the different “races” in the Holy Roman Empire, a saint everyone could rally around was encouraged.

Being an Italian saint, special foods are prepared. There are St. Lucy pastry—which are cakes shaped like eyeballs. I also found this: “In honor of a miracle performed by St Lucy during a famine in 1582 (she made a flotilla of grain-bearing ships appear in the harbor — the people were so hungry they boiled and ate the grain without grinding it into flour), Sicilians don't eat anything made with wheat flour on her day. Instead they eat potatoes or rice in the form of arancine, golden croquettes shaped and fried to the color of oranges and filled with chopped meats. In Palermo, everyone eats cuccia, a dessert of whole-wheat berries cooked in water, then mixed with sweet ricotta.

I found this on another website. I have no reason to doubt it, except one. I have many Italian friends and many of them are Sicilians. None of them ever made any special St. Lucy foods, although they do so for other feast days. On the other hand, I never heard of this Saint until I saw this beautiful, if eerie statue.

By the way, Dante includes St. Lucy in Canto II. she is an intermediary—she gets Beatrice to send Virgil to guide Dante through Hell.

If you notice the left hand of this statue is cracked. It had to be repaired. This statue is actually from St. Lucy’s church, way the heck over on 15th Street, which was closed in the 80s. The church building is still fallow, but some of the other buildings now serve as a homeless shelter and food kitchen. Here is a blog item I posted late last year about some of the controversies regarding St. Lucy in Jersey city.

In addition to this statue, St. Michael also inherited an actual relic of St. Lucy. That was stolen a few years ago, a case that has never been solved.