Feast Day: December 13th | Virgin and Martyr | Patronage: Writers; Salesmen; Martyrs; the Blind; Throat Infection; Epidemics; Mtarfa, Malta; and Perugia, Italy | Imagery: Holding a cord, eyes on a dish, a lamp, or swords. A woman: hitched to a yoke of oxen; in the company of Saints Agatha, Agnes of Rome, Barbara, Catherine of Alexandria, and/or Thecla; kneeling before the tomb of Saint Agatha.
This coming year in our diocese, and in all the dioceses of our country, we are setting out on a renewal based on the Eucharist, a Eucharistic Revival, as the USCCB has called it. This first year in the diocese of Springfield, IL, we will begin on December 8th, (asking the patroness of our diocese, Our Lady in her Immaculate Conception, to bring us to Jesus). By starting on that day, we beg Mary to teach us to “do whatever He [Jesus] tells” us, to “show unto us the Blessed Fruit of thy womb, Jesus”, Our Lord Jesus present personally, truly, in the Blessed Sacrament. Mary, of course, is the Queen of all the saints and angels, and the more we come to know and befriend the saints, the more we find that they also only ever point us towards Jesus. So, this coming year, we are going to take the saints as our guides and encouragers in this great project of our Church, that each of us would encounter Jesus anew and ever more deeply in His gift to us of Himself in the Eucharist.
Most of the saints I will look at this year will be those specifically mentioned in the Roman Canon, the Eucharistic Prayer given the most prominence, and having an amazing pedigree, in our Church. Before seminary I had not paid much attention to the different Eucharistic Prayers that the Church gives the priest to pray. There are four primary ones and multiple others for various occasions, though we are probably most familiar with the Second Eucharistic Prayer (the one that compares the calling-down/overshadowing/epiclesis of the Holy Spirit upon the offerings to “the dewfall”) and the Third Eucharistic Prayer (the one that begins “You are indeed Holy, O Lord, and all you have created rightly gives you praise”, and allows the priest to include after Mary, Joseph, and “Your blessed Apostles and glorious Martyrs” the Saint of the day or a Patron Saint).
But the First Eucharistic Prayer (called the Roman Canon, because it was the prayer that developed especially in Rome during the first five hundred years of the Church’s history), is the one that has had the longest history in the Roman Catholic Church (though there are similarly longstanding Canons/Eucharistic Prayers/Anaphora’s [a word meaning “carrying-up”] found in Eastern Rite Liturgies and the Eastern Churches). Some parts of this prayer stretch back to the very beginning of the Church, as we will find throughout this year, and it has been said by every Roman Catholic priest who celebrated the Mass since Gregory the Great in 590 A.D.! This same prayer was recited by Augustine of Canterbury when he brought England to Christ, and Boniface went to Germany. St. Stephen and later St. Elizabeth, heard it at Mass in Hungary, St. Francis in Italy, and St. Margaret in Scotland. It was this same prayer that was offered to God if you had gone to Mass with Thomas Aquinas, Joan of Ark, John Fisher, Isaac Jogues, Andrew dun Lac and his Companions in Vietnam, Alphonsus Liguori, Maria Goretti, Therésè of Lisieux, Padre Pio, or Mother Theresa.
But this great and ancient prayer is not marked as much by all of those saints, but double listing of some of the saints of the early church (think of “… John and Paul, Cosmas and Damien …”) and this week we celebrate one of the women listed in the second such litany: St. Lucy. Named after the Latin word for light, [“lux/lucis”, compare with the English words “lux”, “lucid”, “lucifer”, “lumen”], we beautifully begin this year-long project with a saint of light. St. Lucy was a young woman living in the 300s in Sicily. She and her mother, Eutychia, took a pilgrimage to Catania to visit the tomb and shrine of St. Agatha (there Eutychia was cured of her lengthy illness, and Lucy found that she, like Agatha, was being called to consecrate herself as a virgin to Christ). Like Agatha, who had been martyred 50 years before Lucy only 50 miles away, that decision angered the suitors who wanted Lucy’s hand (and dowry) in marriage, and when persecution against Christians arose in that Roman territory in the 3rd century A.D., Lucy was also maltreated and then martyred.
How can Lucy begin our delving into the mystery and gift of the Eucharist? Perhaps she teaches us the simplest, but most profound, of truths: the Eucharist is a gift, and must be received. If we receive a gift but never unwrap it, have we really received it?! If we receive Christ, but never return the favor, have we really opened our heart to Him?! When you or I receive Holy Communion, do we listen to Christ then and there to hear how He asks us to give ourselves back? Or do we go on with our day just exactly as we were planning to before?
– Fr. Dominic Rankin often asks himself, and the Lord in prayer, why receiving Holy Communion does not seem to do much to him? Shouldn’t there be results? Where is the joy? Why haven’t I been transformed yet? St. Lucy shows us that the fault lies not with Christ’s gift to me, but my lackluster self-gift back to Him.