St. Agnes (January 21st)

Of the various saints and other days commemorations this week:

Jan 20th -- St. Fabian, Pope and Martyr 

Jan 20th -- St. Sebastian, Martyr 

Jan 21st -- St. Agnes, Virgin and Martyr

Jan 22nd -- Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children (USA)

Jan 23rd -- St. Vincent, Deacon and Martyr

Jan 23rd -- St. Marianne Cope, Virgin (USA)

Jan 24th -- St. Francis de Sales, Bishop and Doctor of the Church 

Jan 25th -- The Conversion of Saint Paul the Apostle 

Jan 26th -- St. Thomas Aquinas, Religious and Doctor of the Church


I’ve chosen to write about St. Agnes, Virgin and Martyr.


I do so because along with other women martyrs of the early Church – St. Agatha (Feb. 5th), St. Cecilia (Nov. 22nd), St. Barbara (Dec. 4th), St. Lucy (Dec. 13th), her memory serves to remind all of us of the reality that women across all of human history have been subject to sexual violence in ways that most men simply have not.


St. Fabian, St. Sebastian and St. Vincent the Deacon also commemorated this week, were all martyrs as well.   St. Sebastian was tied to a pole and shot through by arrows.  St. Vincent died like another Deacon, St. Laurence, being roasted on a grid iron.  St. Fabian apparently simply died in prison.


Still the early women martyrs almost always sexually abused and humiliated prior to their deaths, and were almost always killed because they “put Jesus first” before some powerful man, and the saint’s “rejection” of him was taken as justification to abuse her, sexually humiliate her and have her killed. 


This happened to St. Agnes.  Born into a rich Roman family during the time of the early persecutions (c. 300 AD), she became a Christian secretly, even apparently to her own family.  When she then refused to consider marriage proposals from suitors who were not Christian, her own father ordered her to do so.  When she refused, she was stripped and dragged by a crowd of men to a brothel and then in some mock trial “sentenced to death.”  After apparently several attempts to burn her at the stake failed, she was beheaded.  


In her story, and really in the stories of many of the other early Christian women martyrs is clearly the point that these women considered “putting Jesus first” as way of avoiding being forced into bad marriages.  


Yet, sexual violence occurs even today.  While men too are subject at times to sexual violence, the vast majority of victims of sexual violence are women.


Then both in the United States and across the world, a stunning percentage of women who were murdered were murdered by their current or former partners.


It simply remains that women are often terribly abused, and then specifically sexually abused in numbers and percentages that men simply are not.


Yet St. Agnes and so many other early Christian women saw in Jesus freedom.  Can we honestly respect this desire for freedom and self-determination and then allow women to determine what that freedom completely entails?


How many other women must be tormented, humiliated and murdered before they are allowed finally to seek their own God given destinies to be free?


St. Agnes, please pray for us!



Caption: Accompanying picture of St. Agnes from a painting of Massimo Stanzione (c. 1650)

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