CONCERNING SAINT LUCINA,
A ROMAN MATRON,
CENTURY I, OR CENTURY IV?
HISTORICAL INQUIRY.
Whether there existed and are venerated two Lucinas, or one.
Lucina, a Roman Matron (St.)
BY D. P.
As different as are the times of Nero and of Diocletian, so different also ought one to believe the Lucinas to be, if equally great certainty were held concerning each. For the first, the Acts of SS. Processus and Martinianus are cited, to be given on July 2: for there it is read that, when those men were placed in the Mamertine Prison, where they had been baptized by Saints Peter and Paul, a certain matron, a venerable woman, In the Acts of SS. Processus and Martinianus a Lucina is named under Nero, Lucina by name, ministered to them ceaselessly; and when they were being led to execution, the most blessed Lucina followed them, with her household, all the way until she came near the structure of the aqueduct, where also they were beheaded. Finally, it is said that the most holy woman Lucina gathered up their bodies, and embalmed them with precious spices, and buried them on her own estate, in a sandpit, near the place where they were beheaded, on the Aurelian Way.
[2] Relying on these Acts, Ado of Vienne, after repeating the Natale of St. Paul; a disciple of the Apostles, according to Ado and Usuard, says, Likewise the Natale of the most blessed Lucina, a Disciple of the Apostles. Following this very thing in his own manner and style, Usuard reports it in the same words, At Rome the Natale, etc.; and under this form also St. Lucina was commemorated in the Roman churches, which everywhere used the Martyrology of Usuard, up to the Gregorian reformation: whose curators thought they should imitate Peter Galesinius, who used this rather lengthy eulogy, yet with some restriction. Galesinius, more inclined than is just to change in his own judgment, or to add new ones, very notable circumstances of things or of times, had written thus: At Rome of St. Lucina, Martyr: who, a noble Roman matron, instructed in the religion of the faith by the blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, to Galesinius she is also a Martyr: having received baptism, strove to relieve with her own resources those who were in chains for the confession of the faith; and finally, when they had undergone martyrdom, to consign their bodies to burial. Having often performed this office of piety, at last she is crowned with martyrdom; buried in that place which she herself had built for the burial of the bodies of the Martyrs. In the Notes it is added: As is reported in the Acts of the holy Martyrs Processus and Martinianus. Concerning her, besides, write Bede (the spurious one, of course), Ado of Trier (rather, of Vienne), and Usuard; whose words we have all already given, yet without any mention of martyrdom. At Rome there is a crypt, built by her, for burying the bodies of the holy Martyrs.
[3] The Reformers of the Roman Martyrology act more cautiously, when, omitting the mention of martyrdom, which is rightly omitted in the Roman Martyrology, they took the rest from Galesinius, preserving at the beginning the words of Usuard, customarily read of old. At Rome of St. Lucina, a disciple of the Apostles, who, sharing her resources with the needs of the Saints, visited Christians detained in prison, and attended to the burial of Martyrs; beside whom she too, in a crypt built by herself, In the Acts of St. Stephen the Pope she is called not Lucina, but Lucilla. was buried. But neither is this proved concerning the crypt. For the Acts of SS. Processus and Martinianus have nothing about a crypt. And the Acts of St. Stephen the Pope, which Aringhi adduces in more than one place to confirm his Subterranean Rome, although in some manuscripts they say that, having escaped from the hands of the persecutors, when thunder had occurred and the temple of Mars had collapsed, he proceeded to the nearby cemetery of Lucina. Yet in Surius, and in other manuscripts, the cemetery of Lucilla is named, so that hence no proof can be had.
[4] Baronius in his Notes on this day: There lived, moreover, he says, Another Lucina under Diocletian is had from the Acts of St. Sebastian, another Roman Lucina, in the times of the Emperor Diocletian: who, no less than the former, devoted to works of piety, was renowned; concerning whom there is frequent treatment in the Acts of St. Sebastian, and in the deeds of St. Marcellus the Pope. St. Sebastian suffered around the year 284, according to the opinion of Baronius, whom our Bollandus follows: in whose Life, ascribed to St. Ambrose as author, at no. 36, it is said that, when Nicostratus, Prefect of the City, was converted with his whole household, of the women baptized, mothers were made Beatrix and Lucina; and that this one is venerated on June 30, Bollandus notes there. Then, when St. Sebastian's martyrdom was completed, it is said at no. 88 that the Saint appeared in a dream to St. Lucina, a certain most religious matron, saying: In that sewer which is beside the Circus, you will find my body, hanging on a hook. When you have lifted this, you will bring it to the Catacombs, and bury it at the beginning of the crypt, whom she herself buried at the Catacombs, beside the footsteps of the Apostles. Then Bl. Lucina, herself in person, with her servants, went off in the middle of the night; and lifting him up, placed him on her pavone (litter); and brought him to the place where he himself had commanded, and with all diligence buried him. And Lucina herself for thirty days did not depart from that holy place: who, as soon as the Church received the glory of peace, made her own house a church; to which, leaving all her wealth for the repose of Christians, she made the church itself heir in Christ.
[5] Here someone interposed: After some years, however, peace was restored to the Church; and she made her house to be consecrated as a church in the year, not 312, truly indeed, but inopportunely as to the context, and therefore to be deleted. For the years must be reckoned at about 28, namely from the death of St. Sebastian up to 312, when Constantine, having conquered and slain Maxentius, entered the City, and caused every persecution to cease in it. Meanwhile that the testament was first drawn up, and the house dedicated as a church, the Acts of St. Marcellus the Pope indicate, given on January 16; and likewise where that House was, when, after the narrated slaughter of St. Cyriacus and his companions, and their burial, attended to on the 17th before the Kalends of April in the year 309, the Author begins Chapter V thus: But after eight days, Marcellus the Bishop, coming with Lucina, a most Christian Matron, embalmed the bodies of the Saints with spices and linen cloths, and placed them by night on a litter with his eunuchs … on the 6th before the Ides of August. At the same time Bl. Lucina made a donation of her estate from all her possessions, but in 309, if credit can be given to the Acts of St. Marcellus the Pope: to the holy Catholic Church. Hearing this, Maximian Augustus, indignant, condemned her with proscription. But blessed Lucina asked St. Marcellus the Bishop to consecrate her house as a church: which Marcellus the Bishop did with all devotion. But when he had frequently celebrated Masses in that same house, in the middle of the city, on the Via Lata; hearing this, Maximian Augustus, enraged, sent into that same church, and made it his decree, that in that same church planks should be laid down, for the animals of the public stable; and he assigned that same Marcellus the Bishop to the service of the animals, with a public guard: where also, after many years of serving, clothed in a hair-cloth garment, he gave up his spirit, on the seventeenth day before the Kalends of February. Whose body John the Presbyter seized by night with Bl. Lucina, and buried in the cemetery of Priscilla, etc.
[6] But that these Acts, although ancient, and seen and described by Bede, are nonetheless of slight authority, Bollandus recognized and showed, but these are proved to be very badly stitched together, on account of Marcellinus and Marcellus the Pontiffs, and Maximian Augustus and Maxentius Caesar, being foully confused; and he pointed out many other errors against the more certain history; to which may also be added, the name of the Catholic Church, prematurely applied to the Roman Church, and the many years of service in the stable, falsely attributed to Marcellus, who could have spent only a few months or weeks there, dying the very next year, 310, and obtaining Eusebius as his successor. With these things observed, it becomes probable Why should not Lucina have been borrowed from the Acts of St. Sebastian? that from the aforesaid Acts of St. Sebastian, hitherto judged trustworthy, nor unworthy of St. Ambrose as author, Lucina was borrowed, who might thus serve for the rash patching-together of the Acts of St. Marcellus. And why should not suspicion be founded upon a similar presumption, concerning the Acts of the Saints Processus and Martinianus? That these indeed are more recent than those, is gathered from this, that Bede, having pursued with special zeal the Acts of the Roman Martyrs, in order to glean them in his genuine (which we were the first to produce) Martyrology; concerning Marcellus indeed he wove a synopsis, [and these same things were intruded into the Acts of SS. Processus and Martinianus, neither trustworthy nor ancient:] taken from the words already produced; but coming to the saints Processus and Martinianus, he set down their names alone, just as he found them inscribed in the Roman Calendars, on account of their own church in the City. Florus too was ignorant of these Acts, and their first use is found in Ado, then Usuard, as I said above.
[7] Therefore the foundation for establishing two Lucinas is lacking; and the conjecture of Ado alone can be seen to have introduced the first, and so there was only one alone? on that day on which perhaps in the sacred shrine of St. Sebastian at the Catacombs, some annual commemoration of her was made. That she at least wished to be buried there, the tradition of that church holds, and Panciroli in his Hidden Treasures of the City of Rome, p. 434, says that beside St. Sebastian she was laid in the cemetery of Calixtus; and that in the last restoration of that Basilica, made at the beginning of the 17th century by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, although the body of St. Sebastian, from a deeper place, was raised into another, where now his most ornate Confession is seen; yet the body of St. Lucina remained in the first place of her burial, covered over with an iron grate:
yet not the whole of it can survive there, because John, Bishop of Lucca, the first of his name, in the year 787 had a part of it from there. Concerning the translation of this part Franciotti too treats, in his book on the saints of Lucca; and he adds that for this reason among his people a feast is celebrated in the Cathedral on July 1, as being the first day not impeded, after the last day of June, which is impeded by the festive Commemoration of St. Paul the Apostle.
[8] We have given on the 11th of May the Acts of SS. Anthimus and his Companions, Roman Martyrs, of such a kind and she was the wife of Pinianus the Proconsul, that Henschen judged a good part of them to have been written down by Roman Notaries, at the very time of the persecution itself; other parts added a little later by the Faithful, who were privy to the acts; and so all of best fidelity. Here at once in the beginning there is treatment of Lucina, daughter of Sergius Terentianus, twice Prefect of the City, granddaughter of the Emperor Gallienus, married to Faltonius Pinianus, Proconsul of Asia: by whose efforts her husband Pinianus was converted, and baptized with his whole household by St. Anthimus the Presbyter; and when he and his companions had been slain in various ways, he died piously. But his widow, day and night persevering in prayer, offered to God a most chaste service. She is said to have buried, first St. Sebastian; then her companion St. Beatrix, named above from her Acts, who buried also many other Martyrs; sister of SS. Simplicius and Faustinus, Martyrs to be commemorated on July 25; and finally SS. Cyriacus, Largus, and Smaragdus; whose Acts, to be illustrated on August 8, agree well enough with the aforesaid Acts of St. Anthimus, which conclude thus: But Lucina herself completed the age of ninety-five years, in which whole span she did not cease from the work of almsgiving, from prayer and fasting, she was buried in peace at St. Sebastian's, in hymns and canticles, in the perfection of faith and chastity; and with all good and holy things, she too good and holy, went forth to the Lord. But where buried, rather than there where she herself had buried St. Sebastian, and where even now her body or a part of her body is said to be held? since, on the contrary, concerning her who had buried SS. Processus and Martinianus, nothing is read to be found anywhere.
[9] In her dwellings in the fifth Region of the City, assigned to the Campus Martius, in whose dwellings the church of St. Lawrence in Lucina was built, I would believe, was built the church of St. Lawrence in Lucina, so called; just as another, in the twelfth Region, was named St. Lawrence in Damaso, because it was built by him, very probably in those very dwellings which before his Pontificate he had inhabited. For as to what is said of the church of St. Marcellus on the Via Lata, since it rests on no other foundation than his Acts; it falls together with them, likewise; until it be better confirmed from elsewhere, which can scarcely be hoped for. who had also served St. Marcellus. The rest can be read in May, and from what is said here those things can be supplemented, and at the same time this day held according to the mind of Bollandus, as that of her who buried St. Sebastian; and among the Saints to whose burial Lucina devoted herself, this one will rather be reckoned than that of St. Marcellus; although I can scarcely doubt that to him also she rendered services the greater, the greater was his dignity in the Church.
[10] In the second Catalogue of the Roman Pontiffs, extended down to Boniface II and the year of Christ 530, [She is feigned to have translated the bodies of the Apostles under Pope Cornelius,] and from there in Anastasius the Librarian; it is read of St. Cornelius the Pope, whom I have taught was ordained at the end of April in the year 251, and died the following year; it is read, I say, there of St. Cornelius, that at his request a certain Matron (Anastasius calls her Lucina) lifted by night the bodies of the Apostles Peter and Paul from the Catacombs; and the body of Bl. Paul, received, Bl. Lucina placed on her estate on the Ostian Way, near the place where he was beheaded: and finally the body of Cornelius himself, beheaded at Rome at the temple of Mars, Bl. Lucina gathered up by night, and buried in a crypt, beside the cemetery of Calixtus, on the Appian Way, on her own estate.
[11] But just as this is repugnant to the more ancient and better Catalogue of the Pontiffs, written in its second part from Pontianus down to Eutychianus, if not successively immediately after the death of each Pontiff, at least all together around the year 280 (for there it is said that, expelled to Centumcellae, which, long afterward, were still in the Catacombs, he there received with glory his repose, not as a Martyr, but as a Confessor) so this contradicts the Acts of St. Sebastian, who orders himself to be buried beside the footsteps of the Apostles, who were thus still lying in the Catacombs in the time of Diocletian. Therefore the Acts also of St. Cornelius, from which these things are drawn, are most similar to the Acts of St. Marcellus, even in this, that they ascribe the death of St. Cornelius to Decius, whose exile ought to have been imputed to Gallus and Volusianus, and they contain many other frivolous things; and therefore from them nothing certain can be had concerning Lucina, who, born of a granddaughter of the Emperor Gallienus, who in the year 254 began to reign with his father Valerian; joined to a husband who died a little before the Martyrdom of Sebastian, and they themselves not yet born. must have been quite a young girl, of perhaps 14 or 16 years, born around the year 270, when Cornelius had not long since died; for she could only have been born twenty years after his death, though she died in her 95th year of age. and must have lived up to about the year 365; if indeed from the Acts of St. Anthimus we saw that she herself completed the age of ninety-five years.