Saint Agnes

Virgin and Martyr

Feast Day

January 21

Life

291–304

Born

Rome

Agnes was a virgin martyr of Rome during the persecution of Diocletian, killed about 304 at the age of twelve or thirteen. She is among the earliest and most universally venerated martyrs of the Western Church. The Depositio Martyrum of 354 records her commemoration on January 21 at the catacomb on the Via Nomentana, where the Constantinian basilica of Sant'Agnese fuori le mura was later built.

The fourth-century witnesses to her martyrdom are independent and remarkably consistent. Saint Ambrose of Milan, in De Virginibus book I, written about 377, describes her as a girl barely twelve who confessed Christ before the magistrate, refused to renounce her consecration to him, and faced both fire and the sword without yielding. Pope Saint Damasus I composed a metrical inscription for her tomb at the Via Nomentana that names her a martyr of the persecution. Prudentius, in his Peristephanon (hymn 14), and Augustine in Sermon 273 give similar witness.

According to the tradition followed by Ambrose, when she refused marriage to a pagan suitor, she was condemned and executed by sword stroke to the throat. Her name (Agnes), which the Latin tradition associated with agnus, lamb, was reinforced by the early Roman custom of the blessing of two lambs on her feast day; the wool from these lambs is woven into the pallia conferred by the Pope on metropolitan archbishops.

Her name is inserted in the first list of the Roman Canon (Eucharistic Prayer I). The basilica of Sant'Agnese fuori le mura at Rome remains the center of her cult.