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[01 Oct 2008|09:08pm] |
( warded private. )
[warded to Tracey Davis]
I'd like to take you out for lunch some time next week, or perhaps this weekend. When would work well for you?
[/Tracey]
You know, most of the early female saints -- early here meaning "from the age of martyrdom" -- were canonised because, in the face of arranged marriages, they refused to marry, refused to have sex with their husbands, or were raped, then were killed for their "impudence" and placed forever in our memories for their "virtue." Take Saint Agnes, for example: she was thirteen, both a Roman noble and a Christian, and, when she refused to marry the son of the Prefect Sempronius, she was slated for execution. However, as Roman law prohibited the execution of virgins, Sempronius stripped her naked and dragged her to a brothel; on the way, her hair grew to cover her entire body and then, when they got there, all the men who tried to rape her were struck blind. So they tied her to a stake and attempted to set her alight; this, too, did not happen the way that they wished.
So, finally, the officer in charge of her execution gave up and stabbed her in the throat. Much blood, much dying, no renunciation of her faith; the early Church loved it.
Personally, I think that Emerentiana -- daughter of Agnes's wet nurse, who spoke out against the people who killed her sister-but-not -- and Cecilia -- victim of the Prefect Turcius Almachius, who attempted to have her die of heat stroke (didn't work), beheaded (the executioner failed three times), and then just left her to die in a cell, which she did, though it does bear noting that she did not decompose after she died; and, throughout all of this, she didn't renounce her faith or give the Romans power over her emotions -- are far more admirable. But that's just me.
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