medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (2. March) is also the feast day of:
Luke Casalius (Luca Casali; 12th cent. ?). Hard on the heels of Leo
Luke of Corleone (1. March) and not long after Luke of Messina (27.
February) comes yet another Luke venerated in Sicily, this time at two
towns in today's Enna province, Nicosia and Agira. This Luke has a Vita
(BHL 4979) redacted from now lost manuscripts at Nicosia by Ottavio
Gaetani SJ (d. 1620), who also polished up the "barbarous" Latin of his
source material. A good example of the sort of humanist revision that
the Bollandists themselves avoided but nonetheless were sometimes forced
by circumstance to publish in the _Acta Sanctorum_, this document tells
us that L. was born at Nicosia and educated in early childhood by a
prefect of the monastery of St. Philip at Agira who was then staying in
a Nicosia suburb. When L. was ten, the prefect brought him to the
monastery, where he became a monk and later was made priest. Having
exhibited all sorts of exemplary behavior, he in time was elected
prefect but declined, only to relent when his monks got the pope to
persuade him to accept. His conduct in office was praiseworthy, though
he went blind while administering his charge.
L.'s blindness led to a miracle. He had been visiting his family in
Nicosia and on the way back to Agira the monks who were his companions
convinced him that a crowd of townspeople was following him in the hope
of hearing a sermon. The deceived L. obligingly preached to a landscape
devoid of people (other than the saint and his companions), whereupon
the rocks that lay about the place responded with a chorus of 'Amen',
thus proving his sanctity to the astonished tricksters. L. died at the
monastery in Agira and was buried there; upon the urging of the people
of Agira, the pope entered him in the number of the saints. The people
of Nicosia, wishing to honor one of their own, dedicated a church to him
on the spot where the rocks had responded to his preaching.
Thus far L.'s Vita. L.'s cult seems to have really blossomed in 1575,
when he liberated Nicosia from a plague; that town made him its patron
and celebrated his feast at public expense. Towards the end of the
century, his remains, along with those of Philip of Agira and other
saints, were discovered in a hidden resting place in the abbey. With
the exception of a relic granted to Nicosia, they remain there today.
Since the other saints were early medieval Greeks whose remains had
presumably been concealed at the time of the Muslim conquest, it has
been thought that L. too was early medieval. But his Vita suggests
rather a time when papal authority had been restored in Sicily and a
saint who had been buried at the abbey when it was Benedictine (as it
was from the later eleventh century onward).
Agira's originally twelfth-century church of the Most Holy Savior
(Santissimo Salvatore) houses a mitre and the head of a pastoral staff
traditionally believed to have been L.'s. Shown in the last
illustration on this page:
http://digilander.libero.it/agira1/s_s_salvatore.htm
, they are probably those of a fourteenth-century abbot.
Agira's SS. Salvatore also preserves a torah ark (aron) from the 1450s,
rescued from a ruinous former synagogue in the same town:
http://tinyurl.com/f659d
Three views of the abbey church at Agira are here:
http://sicilyweb.com/foto/en/agira/g17.jpg
http://sicilyweb.com/foto/en/agira/g20.jpg
http://sicilyweb.com/foto/en/agira/g13.jpg
And an illustrated, Italian-language account of the abbey is here:
http://www.agiraweb.it/Conoscere_Agira/Chiese/Abbazia/Default.asp
Best,
John Dillon
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