Who was St. Agatha?
Two things about Agatha are certain, the Catholic Encyclopedia says: that she was martyred, and that Christians honored her publicly from very early on. Her name stands on February 5 in the oldest martyrologies of the Western Church, the Martyrologium Hieronymianum and the martyrology of Carthage. In the sixth century Venantius Fortunatus listed her among the most celebrated virgin martyrs. Pope Gelasius, who died in 496, mentions a basilica dedicated to her, and a church of St. Agatha stood in the Subura district of Rome by the fifth century; it passed to the Arian Goths, and Pope Gregory the Great restored it to Catholic worship. A martyr with that much early honor was real.
The story is another matter. The Acts of St. Agatha exist in Latin and Greek, and the Encyclopedia says the Latin text is no older than the sixth century and that neither version "can lay any claim to historical credibility." Franciscan Media says plainly that "almost nothing is historically certain about this saint." The Church reads the legend in her office, and Catholics may love it, but they should know what it is.
The legend goes like this. Vatican News, following the Passio, says she was born around 235 at the foot of Mount Etna to a wealthy and noble family; Franciscan Media gives about 230. Both Catania and Palermo claim her. As a girl she consecrated herself to God and received the veil from her bishop. When the emperor Decius published his edict against Christians in 250, the official charged with enforcing it in Catania, Quintianus (Vatican News calls him proconsul, the Encyclopedia a senator), wanted her for himself, and when she refused him he handed her to a woman named Aphrodisia to break her will. It failed. At her trial she said, "Not only was I born free, but of noble family." Quintianus had her tortured, and her breasts were cut off. In prison, the story says, St. Peter appeared to her and healed the wounds. She was tortured again, laid on hot coals wrapped only in her veil, and she died in prison, praying, on February 5, 251. Vatican News adds that an earthquake shook Catania as she suffered. The Encyclopedia, which does not vouch for any of this, says only that "eventually she succumbed to the repeated cruelties practised on her."
Her veneration in Catania began at once. Vatican News says that about a year after her death Etna erupted and lava flowed toward the city; the people carried her veil from her tomb and held it before the lava, and the flow stopped. Her relics are kept in the cathedral of Catania, which is dedicated to her, and the city has honored her as its patron ever since.
Why Catholics pray to St. Agatha for breast cancer
No papal document names St. Agatha patron of anyone. Franciscan Media lists among her patronages "healing from diseases of the breast," along with nurses, foundry workers, miners and Alpine guides; the Catholic Encyclopedia says that around Etna she is invoked against eruptions, fire and lightning. All of this is traditional, and the breast patronage is the one most Catholics know.
It comes from the mutilation in her legend. The Encyclopedia notes that this wound became her defining image in medieval art, and women facing the same wound through disease rather than torture took her as their own. The Church is not squeamish about this. A woman who has just been told she has breast cancer, who is waiting for a biopsy result, who is facing a mastectomy or has had one, or who feels that her body has been made strange to her, has in Agatha a saint whose body was attacked at exactly that place and who, in the story, was healed and kept whole by Christ. Catholics ask her prayers for cure, for courage before surgery, for peace about scars, and for daughters and sisters who carry the same risk. Nurses ask her too, since Franciscan Media counts them among those she looks after.
How to pray to St. Agatha
Her memorial is February 5, kept on the General Roman Calendar as a Memorial, and a novena can be prayed January 27 to February 4. The Encyclopedia notes the old custom of blessing bread and water at her Mass, called "Agatha bread." Pray any day you need her.
Say the prayer below and name the diagnosis, the date of the surgery, the person. Pair it with Confession and the Eucharist and, if you are the one who is ill, ask your priest for the Anointing of the Sick. Prayer to St. Agatha accompanies screening, treatment and follow-up and never replaces them; keep the mammogram appointment, follow the oncologist's plan, take the medicine. The grace you ask of her is the grace of her legend: not that the wound never comes, but that Christ comes to the wound.