Visitors to Rome are taken to the Church of S. Prisca, built on the original site of her house—the house in which S. Peter lodged. Prisca was a noble Roman lady who, on account of her profession of Christianity, was exposed in the amphitheatre at the age of thirteen. The lions refusing to devour her, she was beheaded in prison. In the IIId century we behold S. Agatha displaying a fortitude before her judge which has never been surpassed by man, and suffering without resistance torture of exquisite cruelty—the tearing open of her bosom by iron shears. In the same century Apollonia, daughter of a magistrate in Alexandria, was baptized by a disciple of S. Anthony, and there appeared an angel, who threw over her a garment of dazzling white, saying, “Go now to Alexandria and preach the faith of Christ.” Many were converted by her eloquence; for her refusal to worship the gods she was bound to a column, and her beautiful teeth were pulled out one by one by a pair of pincers, as an appropriate atonement for her crime. Then a fire was kindled, and she was flung into it. Apollonia preaching to the people of Alexandria forms the subject of a famous picture by a favorite pupil of Michael Angelo—Granacci—in the Munich gallery. In the beginning of the IVth century a Roman maiden, whose name is popularly known as Agnes, gave up her life for her faith. “Her tender sex,” says a Protestant writer, “her almost childish years, her beauty, innocence, and heroic defence of her chastity, the high antiquity of the veneration paid to her, have all combined to invest the person and character of S. Agnes with a charm, an interest, a reality, to which the most sceptical are not wholly insensible.” The son of the Prefect of Rome became enamored of her comeliness, and asked her parents to give her to him as his wife. Agnes repelled his advances and declined his gifts. Then the prefect ordered her to enter the service of Vesta, and she refused the command with disdain. Chains and threats failed to intimidate her; resort was had to a form of torture so atrocious that her woman’s heart, but for a miracle of grace, must have quailed in the pangs of anticipation. She was exposed nude in a place of infamy, and her head fell “in meek shame” upon her bosom. She prayed, and “immediately her hair, which was already long and abundant, became like a veil, covering her whole person from head to foot; and those who looked upon her were seized with awe and fear as of something sacred, and dared not lift their eyes.” When fire refused to consume her body, the executioner mounted the obstinate fagots, and ended her torments by the sword. She is the favorite saint of the Roman women; two churches in the Eternal City bear her name; there is no saint whose effigy is older than hers; and Domenichino, Titian, Paul Veronese, and Tintoretto have perpetuated her glory. In the previous year, at Syracuse, Lucia, a noble damsel, refused a pagan husband of high lineage and great riches, preferring to consecrate herself to a divine Spouse. Her discarded suitor betrayed her to the persecutors, from whose hands she escaped by dying in prison of her wounds. Euphemia, who is venerated in the East by the surname of Great, and to whom four churches are erected in Constantinople, died a frightful death in Chalcedon, four years after Lucia had perished in Syracuse. So general was the homage paid her heroism that Leo the Isaurian ordered that her churches be profaned and her relics be cast into the sea. Devotion found means for evading the mandate, and the sacred remains were preserved. In the same year Catherine, a niece of Constantine the Great, was martyred at Alexandria. From her childhood it was manifest that she had been rightly named—from καθαρός, pure, undefiled. Her graces of mind and person were the wonder and admiration of the people. Her father was King of Egypt, and she his heir. When she ascended the throne, she devoted herself to the study of philosophy. Plato was her favorite author. It is declared that her scholarship was so profound, so varied, and so exact that she confounded a company of the ablest heathen philosophers. The Emperor Maximin, failing to induce her to apostatize, had constructed four wheels, armed with blades, and revolving in opposite directions. Between these she was bound; but God miraculously preserved her. Then she was driven from Alexandria, scourged, and beheaded. St. Catherine has been honored for many centuries as the patroness of learning and eloquence. In art S. Jerome’s name and hers are frequently associated together, as the two patrons of scholastic theology. She carries a book in her hands, like S. Thomas Aquinas and S. Bonaventure, to symbolize her learning, and her statue is to be found in the old universities and schools. She was especially honored in the University of Padua, the Alma Mater of Christopher Columbus. In England alone there were upwards of fifty churches dedicated in her name. The painters have loved to treat her as the Christian Urania, the goddess of science and philosophy. She afforded delightful opportunities of genius to Raphael, Guido, Titian, Correggio, Albert Dürer. In the same century and about the same year Barbara, the daughter of a nobleman in Heliopolis, was decapitated by her enraged father on discovering her profession of the Christian faith; Margaret, who refused to become the wife of a pagan governor, was beheaded at Antioch; Dorothea was slain in Cappadocia.
Sometimes the women of these early days walked to martyrdom with father, husband, brother, or friend; as Domnina and Theonilla; Lucia with Gemmianus, under Diocletian; Daria with Chrysanthus, Cecilia with Valerian, Tiburtius, and Maximus; Flora and Mary in Cordova; Dorothea and her troop of followers; Theodora with Didymus; Victoria and Fortunatus; Bibiana, a young Roman lady, with her father, mother, and sister, whom she inspired and sustained.
Shall we prolong the calendar to show that woman’s courage did not expire with the fervor of apostolic times? There were Thrasilla and Emiliana, aunts of Gregory the Great. There was the English abbess, Ebba, who, with her entire household, perished in the flames of their convent; the noble Helen of Sweden, who was murdered by her relatives in the XIth century.
Did women seek the solitude of the wilderness and the perils of the forest to serve God as hermits and solitaries? They began the practice of the ascetic life in the apostolic days; they had formed communities as early as the IId century; many lived in couples, as the anchorets Marava and Cyra in the first century; some imitated the example of Mary of Egypt, who spent twenty-seven years in isolation. There were the Irish hermit, Maxentia in France; and Modneva, in the IXth century, also Irish, who dwelt for seven years alone in the Island of Trent. S. Bridget of Ireland had her first cell in the trunk of an oak-tree.
When we undertake to answer what sacrifices women have made for religion, it is difficult to frame an adequate reply with sufficient brevity. From the day that S. Catherine gave up the throne of Egypt until this hour, women have been sacrificing for the Catholic faith—everything. If the objects of their attachment are fewer than those of men, their domestic love is of more exquisite sensibility, and its rupture is in many cases, not the result of an instant’s strong resolve, but the slow martyrdom of a lifetime. Nearly all the early heroines of Christianity were women of high social position, of rich and luxurious homes, and many were noted for their beauty, their culture, or their address. Some were on the eve of happy betrothals; yet Eucratis spurns a lover, and Rufina and Secunda depart from apostate husbands. It was to the courage and self-sacrifice of their respective wives that the martyrs Hadrian and Valerian are indebted for their palms. In the IVth century we see the Empress Helen, mother of Constantine the Great, when fourscore years of age, proceeding from Constantinople to Palestine for the purpose of adorning churches and worshipping our Lord in the regions consecrated by his presence. It was she who discovered the true cross of Christ. In the VIIth century Queen Cuthburge of England resigned royal pleasures, founded a convent, and lived and died in it. In the VIIth century Hereswith, Queen of the East-Angles, withdrew from royalty, and became an inmate of the convent in Chelles, France. Queen Bathilde, of France, followed her thither as soon as her son, Clotaire III., had reached his majority, “and obeyed her superior as if she were the last Sister in the house.” The abbess herself, who was also of an illustrious family, was “the most humble and most fervent,” and “showed by her conduct that no one commands well or with safety who has not first learned and is not always ready to obey well.” Radegunde, another queen of France, also passed from a court to a cloister. In the IXth century Alice, Empress of Germany, presented, in two regencies, the extraordinary power of religion in producing a wise and efficient administration of political affairs. She was virtually a recluse living and acting in the splendor of a throne. Is it necessary to more than allude to S. Elizabeth of Hungary, or to her niece, Queen Elizabeth of Portugal, who, after a glorious career, to which we shall allude in another connection, joined the Order of Poor Clares? In the East, Pulcheria, the empress, granddaughter of Theodosius the Great, withdrew from a régime in which she was the controlling spirit, and did not return from her austerities until urgently requested to do so by Pope S. Leo. At her death she bequeathed all her goods and private estates to the poor. Queen Maud of England walked daily to church barefoot, wearing a garment of sackcloth, and washed and kissed the feet of the poor. It was a queen, Jane of France, who became the foundress of the Nuns of the Annunciation.
When we consider the part that woman has had in the formation of the various religious orders, the temerity of the ex-premier in belittling her influence assumes still greater proportions. The undeniable fact that Protestantism has never been able permanently to maintain a single community of women, either for contemplation or benevolence, proves that the Catholic Church alone is the sphere in which woman’s religious zeal finds its fullest and most complete expression; that it is the Catholic faith alone which thoroughly arouses and solidly supports the enthusiasm of her nature, and embodies her ardor into a useful and enduring form. The achievements of women in the religious orders demonstrate that it is impossible to exaggerate this enthusiasm or to overestimate the subtle influence which she exerts in society, Catholic and non-Catholic. Human nature, in whatever creed, bows in involuntary homage to the woman who has left her home, and father and mother, brother, sister, and friends, to follow Jesus Christ and him crucified. This instinct is as old as man. The pagan Greek, the brutal Roman, punished with almost incredible severity offences against their oracles and vestals. History furnishes no instance of a nation possessing a religion however ridiculous, a worship however coarse and senseless, which did not award exceptional deference to the virgins consecrated to the service of its gods. Christianity, which emancipated woman from the domestic slavery in which usage had placed and law confirmed her; which made her man’s peer by its indissoluble marriage tie; and which compelled courts and judges to modify barbarous statutes affecting her civil rights as well as her conjugal relations, has been rewarded by eighteen hundred years of unflagging zeal and unshrinking heroism. If woman had done nothing in the household for the church; if she had been indifferent as a wife and incompetent as a mother; if in the world the sex were merely frivolous, pretty things, such as Diderot would describe with “the pen dipped in the humid colors of the rainbow, and the paper dried with the dust gathered from the wings of a butterfly”; if they had never done anything for religion except what they have done out of the world—in the shade, as it were—Christianity would still have been the gainer, civilization would owe them a vast balance, and the sneer of the ex-premier would be found to describe only his own bitterness.
There has been no salic law in the Catholic Church. Her crowns cover women’s heads as well as men’s; women themselves have vindicated their right to spiritual royalty.
The activity of women for the spread of the Gospel began, as we have seen, in the days of the apostles, when the preaching of Thecla, the exhortations of many women converts, and the courageous utterances of those being led to martyrdom, won multitudes to Christ. The monastic life of woman is as old as that of man. Indeed, our word nun, derived from the Greek νὀννα, passed into the latter language from the Egyptian, in which it was synonymous with fair, beautiful. As rapidly as Christianity moved over the world women joyfully accepted its precepts and hastened to its propagation. Lamartine says that “nature has given women two painful but heavenly gifts, which distinguish them, and often raise them above human nature—compassion and enthusiasm. By compassion they devote themselves; by enthusiasm they exalt themselves.” These two gifts find their freest exercise in conventual life, whether strictly contemplative, as the monastic life in the East was in the beginning, or contemplative and benevolent, as it became in the West. It was, therefore, only natural that women of all degrees should listen to the voice of God summoning them to this state. It was not natural, however, to sever the domestic ties which nature herself had made and religion had blessed. It was no easier in the days of Ebba and Bega than in those of Angela Merici, or S. Teresa, or Catherine McAuley, for the daughter to bid a final farewell to her home and its endearments for an existence of self-immolation, of prayer, of obedience, of humility, and often of hunger and cold, sickness, danger, and want. That women in large numbers have nevertheless chosen this which the world calls the worse life and the apostle the better, from the time of the apostles to the present day, shows that it is in religion they reach the zenith of their capabilities; for they have made no such sacrifices, they have achieved no such successes, in art, in science, nor in literature. They have entered the service of the church through the convent gate, in despite of difficulties which would often have debarred men even from the entertainment of the design. Their toil in the convents has been wholly in the service of mankind. The history of the conventual life of women is not divisible from that of civilization, and in rapidly sketching it we shall discover chapters on the progress of religion, the organization of benevolence, the preservation of learning, and the spread of education. The assistance which women have rendered to the last two has not been properly appreciated.
The catalogue of eminent foundresses is too long to be considered in detail. Every country, every century, has its list of noble virgins, of wealthy widows, or of mothers whose maternal duty was done, building houses for established orders, or, under the authority of the church, founding additional communities, always with a specific design; for the church takes no step without an intelligent purpose. Among these women have been many who were remarkable in more qualities than piety, in other conditions than social distinction; and it is a fact which will scarcely bear debate that it has been inside the convents, or, if outside, under the direction and inspiration of religion, that the mind of woman has enjoyed freest scope and produced palpable and permanent results. It is true that there have been great women in profane history, ancient and modern—a Cleopatra and Semiramis, a Catherine in Russia, an Elizabeth in England; in literature a De Staël, a “George Sand,” and a “George Eliot”; in histrionic art, in poetry, and in court circles, many women have equalled and outshone men; and in science they have significantly contributed to medicine and mathematics. But the annals of women in religion reveal the heroic characteristics of the sex developed far beyond the limit reached in the world.
We have just mentioned S. Elizabeth, Queen of Portugal. What woman has surpassed her in perseverance—that most difficult of feminine virtues? What man has surpassed the utterness of her love for God—that sublimest of virtues in either sex? At eight years of age she began to fast on appointed days; she undertook, of her own accord, to practise great mortifications; she would sing no songs but hymns and psalms; “and from her childhood she said every day the whole office of the Breviary, in which no priest could be more exact.” Her time was regularly divided, after her marriage to the King of Portugal, between her domestic duties and works of piety. She visited and nursed the sick, and dressed their most loathsome sores. “She founded,” says Butler, “in different parts of the kingdom, many pious establishments, particularly an hospital near her own palace at Coïmbra, a house for penitent women who had been seduced into evil courses,” thus anticipating the future Sisters of the Good Shepherd. She built an “hospital for foundlings, or those children who, for want of due provision, are exposed to the danger of perishing in poverty or of the neglect or cruelty of unnatural parents.” She won her ruffianly husband, by patience and sweetness, to a Christian life, and induced him to found, with royal munificence, the University of Coïmbra. She averted wars, and reconciled her husband and son when their armies were marching against each other. She made peace between Ferdinand IV. and the claimant of his crown, and between James II. of Aragon and Frederick IV. of Castile. What woman of profane history furnishes so illustrious and so substantial a record as this? Religion alone supplied its motive and maintained its progress.