THE FEAST OF ST AGNES; THE BLESSING OF THE LAMBS - 21st JANUARY

 THE FEAST OF ST AGNES

THE BLESSING OF THE LAMBS
21 JANUARY



St Agnes was a young girl from a wealthy Christian family, who was martyred in 304 AD, supposedly as a result of betrayal by a rebuffed suitor, who submitted her name to the authorities as a follower of Christianity. The Prefect Sempronius caused her to be dragged through the streets naked to a brothel. She was sentenced to death, bound to a stake, but the wood would not burn, whereupon the officer in charge beheaded her. When her blood poured out onto the floor, as was the custom, (still observed with relics), the Catholics soaked it up with cloths.
She was buried beside the Via Nomentana in Rome. A few days’ later, her foster-sister, Emerentiana, was found praying by her tomb. She was stoned to death. She was venerated as a saint from at least the time of St Ambrose, who gave an account of her death in one of his homilies. Her bones are conserved beneath the high altar of Sant’Agnese fuori le mura in Rome, built over the catacomb that housed her tomb. Her skull is preserved in a chapel in the church of Sant’Agnese in Agone in Rome in the Piazza Navona.
She is the patron saint of those seeking chastity and purity and is also the patron saint of young girls.
THE PALLIUM AND THE BLESSED LAMBS
On the feast day of St Agnes, the Trappist fathers of the Monastery of Tre Fontane, (near St Paul’s Basilica), provide two lambs from their herd to the Benedictine nuns of St Cecilia. The little lambs are taken by the nuns to St Agnes’ Basilica wearing crowns, lying in baskets decorated with ribbons and red and white flowers and ribbons – red for martyrdom and white for purity.
"The wool from the lambs is woven into twelve archbishops’ pallia. The pallium is an older symbol of the papacy than the papal tiara. The elect becomes the ‘Shepherd of Christ’s Flock’ when the pallium touches his shoulder, a symbol that the new bishop is being ‘yoked’ to the bishop of Rome, who is the visible head of the Church. The first recorded recipient of the pallium was Saint Felician of Foligno in 204 AD – (so the concept of the pallium as a symbol of papal primacy is very old indeed).”: catholic culture.org

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