Vigils Reading – St Cecilia

THE VIRGINITY OF

ST CECILIA

From a homily by Fr Ronald Knox

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The legends of the early Roman saints, among whom St Cecilia is

numbered, do not always command great attention from the critically minded

historian. But whether the story of St Cecilia as it is told in her acts is all true or

only partly true, there is a simplicity about the whole story and a simplicity

about St Cecilia’s character in the story which demands a retelling.

Let me remind you in the most general way of her story: how she was

married to a young pagan called Valerian, but persuaded him to respect her vow

of virginity, because her guardian angel would make him sorry for it if he did

otherwise; how Valerian wanted to see this guardian angel, but Cecilia, with her

innocent craft, said he could not do that unless he was baptized first; how he was

baptized, and saw the angel at her side as she prayed; how he made a convert of

his brother Tiburtius, and how first the two brothers, and then Cecilia herself

were punished with death for professing the Christian religion. It is an old story,

and a familiar one: and while we do all homage to other great saints for their

public witness to Christ, we shall always need St Cecilia as well, quietly working

at home for the conversion of her own husband and his family.

Not that St Cecilia herself was in the position of a modern wife. Like so

many Christian ladies of her time, she had taken, in imitation of our blessed

Lady, a vow of perpetual virginity. These virgin martyrs were martyrs because

they were virgins: it was because they insisted on keeping their vow when their

parents wished them to marry that the secret of their attachment to the

Christian faith was discovered; and it was their persistency in maintaining it

that led to their martyrdom.

It would be hard to estimate…how much the unpopularity in Roman

society of the Christian faith owed to its tradition of virginity. Virginity is an

ideal which the pagan had no right to misunderstand. For, in theory, they, too,

honored it; and it should have commended itself to their heathen instinct for

sacrifice. For the point of a sacrifice is that the victim should be spotless, the

best of its kind. You must offer not what you can well afford to spare, but what

will cost you something. That is the pagan idea of sacrifice; and the Christian

idea of sacrifice is based on the same principle. In order to give up something to

God, we forgo, not the sinful pleasures which we have no right to in any case, but

the lawful pleasures which he has given us to enjoy if we will.

So, let St Cecilia’s feast remind us to take our Christian vocation seriously,

to follow out in our lives the words we profess with our lips. And may this

Roman maiden pray for us who worship here and for those who minister to us,

that when Christ, the Master she served, comes again in judgment, we may be

found blameless before almighty God.