Agnes, in Agony

Happy Saint Agnes Day! Saint Agnes was a young Roman lady of 12 or 13 years old who suffered martyrdom in the persecutions of the Emperor Diocletian in about AD 304.

She was one of the youngest of the early martyrs and one of the most moving and articulate.

Agnes hastened to the place of torture as a bride to her wedding feast. Pain had no terror for her—although the fetters slipped from her small hands while even the pagan bystanders were moved to tears.

When the son of the Roman prefect offered to marry her, she replied: “The one to whom I am betrothed is Christ Whom the angels serve.” When the executioner, who was to behead her, hesitated, she encouraged him with the words: “Strike, without fear, for the bride does her Spouse an injury if she makes Him wait”.

(Source)

The early Church Fathers praised her to the skies, and her name is even mentioned in the Roman Canon of the Mass (Eucharistic Prayer I).

On this day, there is a great tradition of two lambs being presented as a tax by the Lateran Canons Regular to the Chapter of St. John.

Why today? At some point, somebody made the connection between “Agnes” and agnus, which of course is the Latin for “lamb”, as in the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

Mind you, Agnes’ name was actually Greek and it is an accident of sound rather than of meaning, but that’s how the poetry of God works sometimes.

The lambs presented today are shorn on Holy Tuesday, and palliums are woven from them by the nuns of the Benedictine convent of St. Cecilia in Trastevere. Palliums are the yoke-like vestment that archbishops wear to remind them of the gentle yoke of Christ that they bear.

The palliums are then placed over Peter’s tomb, becoming themselves second-class relics of the apostle and pope. It is these palliums that are presented to the next class of Metropolitan Bishops. I love traditions like this.

I particularly love the Office of Saint Agnes in the Monastic Breviary, and I’ve written about this in the past.

On the feast of Saint Agnes, I am always reminded of the two young women we met in Rome, coming out of the Church of Saint Agnes in Agony. They were taking the Angels & Demons tour of Italy, and they were quite upset that the author had taken certain liberties with the facts of people and places.

There’s a line that fiction sometimes crosses into falsehood. I think it happens when the author tries to pass off fiction as fact.

Let me try to explain. I love alternate history novels, but the instant that somebody tries to tell me that Guns of the South contains a true account and the south really did win the Civil War, well, they’re lying.

The author of Angels & Demons on the one hand insists his novel is fiction, but on the other hand he says it with a sly wink as if we who share the secret know better. I don’t know if that crosses the line into lying or not, but it does make him a bit of a jerk.

The Church of Saint Agnes in Agony in Rome (Sant’Agnese in Agone) is, oddly, not named after the agonies of the martyr.

in agone was the ancient name of piazza Navona (“piazza in agone”), and meant instead (from Greek) “in the site of the competitions”, because piazza Navona was an ancient stadium on the Greek model (with one flat end) for footraces. (Wikipedia)

In the popular imagination, of course, it has become Agnes herself who is in agony. Truth be told, Agnes’s agonies were fleeting, and now she resides with her Lord in everlasting bliss.

Almightyand everlasting God,
who chooses those
whom the world deems powerless
to put the powerful to shame:
Grant us so to cherish the memory
of your youthful martyr Agnes,
that we may share her pure
and steadfast faith in you;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you
and the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever. Amen.