“Pure,” “chaste.” This is what the name Agnes means in Greek. Therefore, for historians, it is a nickname that identifies one of the most venerated martyrs of the Church. The year is 304, in the midst of the turmoil of anti-Christian hatred unleashed by the Emperor Diocletian (although some scholars place the event during the persecution of Valerian, 40 years earlier). Nothing is known about Agnes apart from her martyrdom, the accounts of which, not always consistent, are scattered throughout various documents written after her martyrdom.

Hate and grace

Tradition tells of an unrequited love, that of the Prefect of Rome’s son for Agnes, who, at only thirteen, has no intention of marrying the nobleman. The young woman has taken a vow of chastity to Christ, and when the Prefect learns this, a reprisal is unleashed: Agnes must enter the circle of Vestal Virgins who worship the patron goddess of Rome. The girl refuses, and the revenge becomes more cruel, moving from the temple to the brothel, with the young woman being displayed among the prostitutes in Piazza Navona. Hagiographic accounts tell how Agnes, by virtue of a higher power, manages—even in that situation—to safeguard her own purity.

Like a lamb

The hatred against her spirals upward. The girl is condemned to be burned at the stake, but the flames don’t even touch her, and then a sword thrust to the throat takes her life. Iconography always depicts Agnes with a lamb at her side because hers is the same fate then reserved for the little sheep. And every January 21, the saint’s liturgical feast day, a pair of lambs raised by the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth are blessed. With their wool, the nuns make the sacred palliums that the Pope bestows upon new metropolitan archbishops on June 29 each year.

Virtue superior to nature

The remains of Saint Agnes are kept in a silver urn commissioned by Paul V, placed inside the Basilica of Saint Agnes on the Via Nomentana, which was built by Princess Constantina, daughter of Emperor Constantine I, over the catacombs where the young woman’s body was buried. Saint Ambrose wrote of her: “Her consecration is beyond her years, her virtue beyond nature: so much so that her name seems not to have come to her by human choice, but to be a prediction of martyrdom, a foreshadowing of what she was destined to be.”