Life of St Lucy

of the saint's story or a popular instinct to link together two national saints. The story, such as we have given it, is to be traced back to the Acts, and these probably belong to the fifth century. Though they cannot be regarded as accurate, there can be no doubt of the great veneration that was shown to St. Lucy by the early church. She is one of those few female saints whose names occur in the canon of St Gregory, and there are special prayers and antiphons for her in his "Sacramentary" and "Antiphonary". She is also commemorated in the ancient Roman Martyrology. St. Aldheim (d. 709) is the first writer who uses her Acts to give a full account of her life and death. This he does in prose in the "Tractatus de Laudibus Virginitatis" (Tract. xliii, P. L., LXXXIX, 142) and again, in verse, in the poem "De Laudibus Virginum" (P. L., LXXXIX, 266). Following him, the Venerable Bede inserts the story in his Martyrology.

With regard to her relics, Sigebert (1030-1112), a monk of Gembloux, in his "sermo de Sancta Lucia", says that he body lay undisturbed in Sicily for 400 years, before Faroald, Duke of Spoleto, captured the island and transferred the saint's body to Corfinium in Italy. Thence it was removed by the Emperor Otho I, 972, to Metz and deposited in the church of St. Vincent. And it was from this shrine that an arm of the saint was taken to the monastery of Luitburg in the Diocese of Spires - an incident celebrated by Sigebert himself in verse. The subsequent history of the relics is not clear. On their capture of Constantinople in 1204, the French found some of the relics in that city, and the Doge of Venice secured them for the monastery of St. George at Venice. In the year 1513 the Venetians presented to Louis XII of France the head of the saint, which he deposited in the cathedral church of Bourges. Another account, however, states that the head was brought to Bourges from Rome whither it had been transferred during the time when the relics rested in Corfinium.

Lucy's name is probably also connected to statues of Lucy holding a dish with two eyes on it. This refers to another legend in which Lucy's eyes were put out by Diocletian as part of his torture. The legend concludes with God restoring Lucy's eyes. Lucy's suffering also played a large part in naming her as a patron saint of the blind and those with eye-trouble.

Whatever the facts, as opposed to the legends, surrounding Lucy, the truth is that her courage to stand up and be counted a Christian in spite of torture and death is the light that should lead us on our own journeys through life.