Unsung Heroines of the Early Church

Mr Pearce discusses Ss Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Cecilia, Agnes, & Anastasia, all named in the Canon of the Mass and all basically forgotten.

From Crisis

By Joseph Pearce

This is the thirtieth instalment of Mr Pearce's series on the Unsung Heroes of Christendom. The other parts are, from previous to first, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Let us look at some holy women of the early centuries of the Church who are not well known.

Whenever the Roman Canon of the Mass is celebrated, there is also a celebration of the saints, dozens of whom are invoked by the priest at the altar. Among these saints are seven women: Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Cecilia, Agnes, and Anastasia. These holy women were martyred during the third and fourth centuries and are justly celebrated by the Church during the holy sacrifice of the Mass. 

Since, however, their names are invoked whenever the Roman Canon is celebrated, they can hardly be considered unsung heroines of Christendom. On the contrary, their praises are sung constantly, in every generation, on every continent, in every century, on every altar. Deo gratias! Since this is so, we will focus instead on other holy women of the early centuries of the Church who are not as well known.

Sts. Callinica and Basilissa were wealthy married women, living in Asia Minor, who took food to their imprisoned fellow Christians. They were arrested in the year of Our Lord 252 and suffered martyrdom for their refusal to offer sacrifices to the pagan gods.

In the following century, St. Macrina the Younger lived a holy life of rigorous asceticism and scriptural scholarship. She was the older sister of two of the greatest Fathers of the Church, Sts. Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa, the latter of whom wrote The Life of St. Macrina in which he praised her depth of learning and the way in which she had served as a role model of holiness for both her younger brothers. 

St. Macrina founded a community of like-minded women who wished to consecrate their lives to God in chastity, prayer, and scholarship. Having died to herself in life, she spurned the creature comforts even in her final illness in the summer of 379, refusing the deathbed itself and choosing to lie and die on the hard floor to which she’d become accustomed.

As St. Macrina had been an inspiration to her far-better-known younger brothers, another little-known female saint, Marcella, would prove to be an inspiration to another of the Church Fathers, St. Jerome. St. Marcella was a widow who was devoting her life to charity, chastity, and prayer when she and Jerome first met. Almost a third of Jerome’s surviving letters are addressed to women, and many of these are addressed to Marcella. Such was the respect and reverence with which she was held by Jerome that, following her death in 410, he wrote to another female correspondent, named Principia, that Marcella had been a great scholar of Scripture who was confident enough to dispute with Jerome the meaning of specific passages as a means of inducing him to assist her in plumbing ever deeper knowledge of the sacred texts.

“How much virtue and intellect, how much holiness and purity I found in her I am afraid to say…lest I may exceed the bounds of men’s belief,” he wrote. Such was Marcella’s status as a scholar, and such was the esteem in which she was held, that Jerome reported that, after he had departed from Rome, “if any dispute arose concerning the testimony of the Scriptures, it was to her verdict that appeal was made.”               

Another female disciple of St. Jerome was St. Fabiola, a Magdalene figure who had divorced her husband and was living with another man, causing great scandal until she repented publicly and began to devote her life to the care of the sick and the poor. While on pilgrimage to Bethlehem at the end of the fourth century, she met Jerome and studied Scripture under his tutelage. While staying in the Holy Land, she stayed at a hostel for women founded by another great female saint of the Early Church, Paula of Rome. 

Although it is often presumed that Cardinal Wiseman’s celebrated novel Fabiola is based on the life of the saint, this is not the case. The eponymous heroine of the novel lives at the beginning of the fourth century, whereas St. Fabiola lived at the century’s end, and the plot of the novel is not a reflection of the known facts of the saint’s life.

In the same manner in which Sts. Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa are far better known than their older sister, and Jerome is far better known than any of his learned female disciples, so the Desert Fathers, such as St. Anthony, are far better known than those whom we might dare to call the Desert Mothers. These include St. Thaïs, a Magdalene-like penitent who had been a wealthy courtesan in Alexandria, offering sexual favors to the rich and powerful until a radical conversion led her to a life of prayer in the Egyptian desert. Other “Desert Mothers” who were pioneers of early monasticism include St. Mary of Egypt, St. Melania the Younger, St. Pelagia, and St. Sarah of the Desert.

Most of these women are little known or indeed completely unknown to all but historians of the Church. We will not hear their names invoked at the altar. And yet they are present at every Mass, unheard and unheeded by the congregation, as members of the company of the saints, the Church Triumphant. We might not sing their praises, but they are eternally singing the praises of their Lord and God. These unsung heroines of the Early Church had sought the Kingdom of God in their earthly lives and have attained it in their heavenly lives. May we be inspired by their example to do likewise.

Pictured: Saint Lucy, by Niccolò di Segna, mid-14th-century Sienese painting, c. 1340. The Saint holds the dagger or sword with which she was ultimately executed and the lamp, her attribute.