February 5 is the feast day of St. Agatha, a virgin martyr from Sicily, Italy, who was killed in 251 AD. As noted in The Bad Catholic's Guide to Good Living:
"The Christian faith could fairly be described as a theological system for recycling the worst things in life and turning them into the best. It calls the day when Christ was sacrificed "Good" Friday. The gruesome deaths of persecuted Christians are dubbed their "feast" days. It's in this spirit that medieval Christians began to mark the Feast of St. Agatha, a noble third-century girl from Palermo or Catania whose legend became very popular in that region and spread throughout Europe."
Like many early female martyrs, Agatha refused an arranged marriage, preferring to devote herself to Christ and live in chastity. Quintianus, the Roman senator who was spurned by Agatha, had her arrested and tortured, based on the Roamn edict against the Christians. Although post-Vatican II we don't hear much anymore about the gruesome details of persecution of the early saints, poor Agatha faced dreadful tortures:
"The saint suffered in this infamous place assaults and stratagems against her virtue infinitely more terrible to her than any tortures or death itself.... Quintianus then ordered her to be stretched on the rack, which torment was usually accompanied with stripes, the tearing of the sides with iron hooks, and burning them with torches or matches. The governor, enraged to see her suffer all this with cheerfulness, commanded her breast to be tortured, and afterwards to be cut off. At which she made him this reproach: "Cruel tyrant, do you not blush to torture this part of my body, you that sucked the breasts of a woman yourself? " He remanded her to prison, with a severe order that neither salves nor food should be allowed her."
"But God would be himself her physician, and the apostle St. Peter in a vision comforted her, healed all her wounds,. and filled her dungeon with a heavenly light. Quintianus, four days after, not the least moved at the miraculous cure of her wounds, caused her to be rolled naked over live coals mixed with broken potsherds. Being carried back to prison, she made this prayer: "Lord, my Creator, you have ever protected me from the cradle; you have taken me from the love of the world, and given me patience to suffer: receive now my soul." After which words she sweetly gave up the ghost."
Yeeks. Medieval paintings depict St. Agatha standing with her breasts on a plate (as shown here, by Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbaran, c. 1630), and she is the patron saint of breast cancer patients. Talk about making the best from the worst.
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