The image of St. Agnes, a child clutching her lamb and the palm of martyrdom, adorned the parish of my childhood. It was there I learned, and lost, the faith, and one of my telling memories of the 1970s church is that she figured not at all in the devotional life of the parish. The Church could have been called St. Gilligan’s for all we ever heard about her.

I’ve heard more than one post-V2 Boomer expressing embarrassment about the fiery faith and often-gruesome martyrdom that characterized the stories of the saints. The Smart Set were better than bloody deaths and glorious wonders.

What a loss: I would have paid attention to that kind of passionate witness rather than the thin gruel I was served. It would have been a welcome contrast to the beige blandness of the church in my youth. I never once heard the story of this incredible girl: a story that would have fired the imaginations and devotions of children who were exactly her age as we made our confirmations. Here was a girl, perhaps 13 years old, who had the virtue, fortitude and faith to stand up against the most powerful men of her day and spit in their eyes.

Modern accounts of Agnes, this virgin martyr of Rome, have a tendency to dismiss the details of her life as later elaborations, but I’m not buying the skepticism. The stories are pretty consistent from an early date, and the devotions are strikingly popular and widespread. I think the story is exactly what tradition says it is: she was a young woman who was promised in marriage to a Roman official, refused and revealed her secret Christianity, was subjected to humiliations in order to break her will and faced her death with bravery and miracles, and the site of her grave became an early locus of devotion.

Her birth was about 291 and her martyrdom in 304 (301 in some accounts) during the persecutions of Diocletian. The liturgy celebrating her on Jan. 21 is early, popular, and widely attested (Roman Martyrology, Gregorian Sacramentary, Liber Antiphonarius, Theodorus Lector, and so on). The deposition of her relics is also honored in connection with Stephen and Laurence in the Gregorian Sacramentary. A second celebration on Jan. 28, within the octave, commemorates the apparition of Agnes to her parents.

Her relics were laid at a family estate on the Via Nomentana, with a cemetery growing around it. Two churches were soon dedicated to her, one (now the site of St. Agnes Outside the Walls) being among the most ancient basilicas in Rome, said to have been built at the request of Constantine’s daughter.

Gregory the Great often attended on her feast and delivered several notable homilies there. Lambs are blessed on this day, and their wool is used to make pallia for archbishops. Her image is often found on glasswork in the catacombs, often depicting her with her lamb or the palm, with doves bearing the crowns of chastity and martyrdom, between two trees, or in the company of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, or Sts. Peter, Paul, Laurence, Vincent, and Hippolytus. Only Peter and Paul appear on glasswork more frequently.

All of this indicates an early and popular cultus. St. Jerome mentions her in a letter to Demetrias, and St. Augustine in Sermon 273. Pope Damasus composed an Epigram in her honor, and Ambrose gives an account of her death in De virginibus, and also wrote a hymn to her. The best-known tribute is the hymn of Prudentius, which is used in the Mozarabic Breviary. It relates the details of her life as were known in the late 4th century, and praises her for crushing the devil and temptations beneath her foot, concluding

O happy virgin, glory but lately dawned,

O noble dweller in the celestial courts,

Adorned with thy resplendent twin diadem,

Deign now to turn thy face on our miseries.

To thee alone the Father of all has given

Power to make pure the dwelling of sin itself.

I, too, shall be made clean by thy radiant glance

If thou wilt fill my heart with its gracious light.

All is pure where thou deignest in love to dwell,

Or where thine own immaculate foot may tread.

St. Jacobus, in The Golden Legend, tells the story in his typically vivid way, explaining how the girl was on her way home from school when a prefect’s son saw her and offered her jewels and great wealth to marry him. She replies, "Go away, you spark that lights the fire of sin, you fuel of wickedness, you food of death! I am already pledged to another!"

She proceeds to berate him by comparison with her beloved, Jesus. The young man falls into a swoon and lovesickness is diagnosed. The prefect’s father attempts to cajole her into marriage with his son, but to no avail. Because she comes from a noble family, he may not force her, but instead brings the charge of Christianity against her. Ordered to offer sacrifice at the temple of Minerva, she refuses, whereupon she is stripped naked and sent to a brothel to shame her.

Miraculously, her hair grows to conceal her body, and angels gather to clothe her in a mantle of light. Those who enter the brothel are dazzled by the light, and fall prostrate in prayer, washed clean of their evil desires.

The prefect’s son urges his friends to violate her, but the light terrifies them and they flee. Calling them cowards, he sets upon her, but the same light drives him away, and he is strangled to death by the devil for his failure. The prefect demands proof of her God: “Bring my son back to life,” he says. She does, and the boy goes forth preaching the gospel in joy.

Witnessing the miracle, the prefect wants to set Agnes free, but the priests of Minerva are enraged and whip up a mob against her. They kindle a fire and cast her in, but the flames divide and consume the mob. Finally, the prefect’s deputy stabs her in the throat, or possibly decapitates her, and she dies.

Her family carries her away to be buried at their estate, and on the octave, while her sister and parents are still mourning, she appears in light surrounded by angels, with a lamb of pure whiteness at her side. She tells them not to mourn, because she now sits with the holy ones upon a throne of pure light. In some accounts, her foster-sister Emerentiana (daughter of her wet nurse) is also martyred while praying at her grave.

When Constance, daughter of Constantine, is struck with leprosy, she visits the grave of Agnes and falls asleep upon it. In a vision, Agnes urges Constance to be constant in Christ, and when she awakes she is cured. In thanksgiving, she is baptized and builds a basilica over the grave. Many miracles follow.

Only 70 years after her death, St. Ambrose would write of her, in De virginibus:

Let men admire, let children take courage, let the married be astounded, let the unmarried take an example. But what can I say worthy of her whose very name was not devoid of bright praise? In devotion beyond her age, in virtue above nature, she seems to me to have borne not so much a human name, as a token of martyrdom, whereby she showed what she was to be.