medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Luke Casalius (in Italian, Luca Casali; d. earlier 12th cent. ?). Hard on the heels of the feast of St. Leo Luke of Corleone (1. March) and not long after that of St. 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. He has a Vita (BHL 4979) redacted from now lost manuscripts at Nicosia -- and probably polished up as well -- by Ottavio Gaetani SJ (d. 1620) in his _Vitae Sanctorum Siculorum_.
According to this account Luke was a native of Nicosia educated in early childhood by the head (Gaetani's word is _praefectus_) of the monastery of St. Philip at Agira who was then staying in a Nicosia suburb. When Luke was ten, this person brought him to the monastery, where he became a monk and later was ordained priest. Having exhibited all sorts of exemplary behavior, Luke in time was elected _praefectus_ 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.
Luke's blindness led to a miracle. On the way back to Agira from a visit to his family in Nicosia the monks who were his companions convinced him that a crowd of townspeople was following in the hope of hearing a sermon. When Luke obligingly preached to a landscape devoid of people (other than the saint and his companions), the rocks that lay about the place responded with a chorus of _Amen_, thereby proving his sanctity to the astonished tricksters. Luke 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 Luke's Vita.
Luke's cult blossomed in 1575, when he freed Nicosia from a plague (presumably the same one from whose ravages Corleone was spared that year through the intercession of St. Leo Luke). Nicosia made him its patron and celebrated his feast at public expense. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Luke's presumed remains, along with those of Philip of Agira and of 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.
Agira's originally twelfth-century chiesa del Santissimo Salvatore houses a mitre and the head of a pastoral staff traditionally believed to have been Luke's. Shown here <http://digilander.libero.it/agira1/mitrapastorale.jpg>, they are probably those of a fourteenth-century abbot. In what seems to have been Luke's time the monastery in Agira was a priory of St. Mary of the Latins (Santa Maria Latina) in Jerusalem. In the later twelfth century it became the center of that abbey's operations and from that time forward its heads were styled abbot.
The same church (SS. Salvatore) also preserves what is said to be Europe's oldest surviving torah ark (aron). Bearing an inscription interpreted as dating it to 1454, it was recognized as an aron only in 1996. When it was rescued from a ruinous former oratory that before the expulsion of Sicily's Jews in 1493 had been Agira's synagogue it was thought to be a nicely carved remnant of a portal:
http://tinyurl.com/m2zrqg7
http://www.sicilyweb.com/foto/1280/1280-07-36-39-9813.jpg
Best,
John Dillon
(matter from an older post lightly revised)
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