Wyatt North - The Life and Prayers of Saint Lucy of Syracuse

The Life and Prayers of

Saint Lucy of Syracuse

Wyatt North

Wyatt North Publishing

Wyatt North Publishing, LLC 2013

A Boutique Publishing Company

Published by Wyatt North Publishing, LLC.

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Scripture texts in this work are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C. and are used by permission of the copyright owner. All Rights Reserved. No part of the New American Bible may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Foreword

One part biography, one part prayer book, The Life and Prayers of Saint Lucy of Syracuse is an essential book for any Christian.

For a saint about whom so very little is really known, Saint Lucy has a surprisingly impressive religious pedigree. Her relics have traveled the world.

Her cult extends across oceans, and every year, large numbers of Italian-Americans travel back home to Sicily, a land they have primarily known through an increasingly distant heritage, to participate in the great festival there in her honor.

She is the bringer of light and lucidity, things which are in fact her namesakes as Lucy, or Lucia as she was known in Latin, itself means light. She is also the patron of the blind, and those suffering from ailments of the eye. Ailments of the throat are also one of her specialties. It would seem like Saint Lucy governs over seemingly small and unimportant aspects of life. Those who had not previously heard of her might expect her to be a small niche-saint.

Yet, there she is, the light that once spread across all of Europe, from Spain in the west to Turkey in the east, and from Sicily in the south to Sweden in the north. She was one of eleven female saints officially recognized in the Roman Catholic Mass as early as the year 600. She makes an appearance in some of the most famous written works of western civilization. She is honored not only in the Catholic Church, but in the Orthodox Church, the Anglican Church, and even the Lutheran Church, which is noteworthy on its own on account of the Lutheran denial of saints.

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Quick Facts

The new Quick Facts section in The Life and Prayers collection provides the reader with a collection of facts about each saint!

Born:

283 AD, Syracuse

Died:

304 AD, Syracuse

Feast:

December 13 th

Attributes:

cord; eyes; eyes on a dish; lamp; swords

The Life of Saint Lucy

Introduction to Her Life

For a saint about whom so very little is really known, Saint Lucy has a surprisingly impressive religious pedigree. Her relics have traveled the world. Her cult extends across oceans, and every year, large numbers of Italian-Americans travel back home to Sicily, a land they have primarily known through an increasingly distant heritage, to participate in the great festival there in her honor.

She is the bringer of light and lucidity, things which are in fact her namesakes as Lucy, or Lucia as she was known in Latin, itself means light. She is also the patron of the blind, and those suffering from ailments of the eye. Ailments of the throat are also one of her specialties. It would seem like Saint Lucy governs over seemingly small and unimportant aspects of life. Those who had not previously heard of her might expect her to be a small niche-saint.

Yet, there she is, the light that once spread across all of Europe, from Spain in the west to Turkey in the east, and from Sicily in the south to Sweden in the north. She was one of eleven female saints officially recognized in the Roman Catholic Mass as early as the year 600. She makes an appearance in some of the most famous written works of western civilization. She is honored not only in the Catholic Church, but in the Orthodox Church, the Anglican Church, and even the Lutheran Church, which is noteworthy on its own on account of the Lutheran denial of saints.

Today, her feast day is celebrated in at least 20 cities in Italy alone, some with relics of their own, the foremost being her hometown of Syracuse. Abroad, she is celebrated with great gusto in Sweden, where she is the only saint condoned by the Lutheran Church except for Saint Stephen, whose celebration has been absorbed by the celebration of Saint Lucy.

In icons, Saint Lucy is often easily identified because she frequently carries a dish on which lie two eyes, along with the palm branch signifying her martyrdom. There are, however, many other ways in which Saint Lucy has been depicted in the almost two millennia since her death. She often carried a lamp, or is depicted with a sword, fire, or oxen, signifying her three miracles. She can also frequently be found in the company of Saint Agatha, or the tomb of the same.

The life story of Saint Lucy can be traced back to a fifth century account in the Acta Martyrum . Although this is the only account of her life known from such an early date, her story must have been well-known for it captured the heart and imagination of Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century. He not only included her in the canon of the Mass, but added special prayers and chants to Saint Lucy in the Gregorian Sacramentary and Antiphonary . A few decades later, a short account of Saint Lucy's life, probably harking back to the Acta Martyrum , appeared in in Bishop Aldhelm of Sherborne's Tractatus de laudibus virginitatis and De laudibus virginum .

The story was then repeated briefly by the Venerable Bede in his Martyrology , who was writing around the same time as Bishop Aldhelm. The two fullest, and most easily accessible accounts of Saint Lucy's life also derive from the fifth century account. They are Lives of the Saints , by the English abbot lfric of Eynsham, writing in the late 10th century, and the Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine, a late medieval best-seller to the extent that a book could be a best-seller in the days before printing presses, compiled circa 1260. The account of Saint Lucy's life in the Golden Legend is irrefutably very similar to that found in the Lives of the Saints , down to the very words spoken, although they sometimes disagree on details.

In addition to these writings, there are several later legends concerning Saint Lucy, which have not been committed to writing in full life accounts, and ones which are hinted at in the iconography of the saint. Lucy is, for example, mentioned several times in Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy .

An Elusive Childhood

Saint Lucy was born around the year 283 in the city of Syracuse, the capital of the Roman province of Sicily. The city of Syracuse, which had long flourished as an important port for the shipment of grain into Roman Italy from the north African and eastern Mediterranean provinces, had been in economic decline for several centuries. Although it was a Roman province so close to the Latin-speaking mainland Italy, Syracuse had a long history of Greek culture.