Herewith the legend of Sta. Procrastinata:
The story of Sta. Procrastinata is difficult to reconstruct: only
one copy of her vita survives, and that sadly damaged. For many years it
was kept in the library of a convent not far from Assisi, and after it
fell out of the aumbry during an earthquake, the precentor neglected for
so long to replace it that it suffered considerable damage from damp and
rats, leaving the text hard to decipher and riddled with lacunae.
It would seem, however, that Procrastinata lived in the time of
Diocletian, and was condemned by him to terrible tortures as a
result of her having neglected, once too often (though of course from the
best possible Christian motives) to pay tribute to the divine emperor.
Diocletian, however, preoccupied with more serious offenders, postponed
the signing of a series of minor edicts, including Procrastinata's death
warrant, and it lay for so long in his in-box that the writing became
abraded by the frequent shuffling of old papyri: eventually it fell
entirely off his to-do list. Procrastinata therefore languished in
prison; as the years went by, her gaoler kept meaning to enquire as to
her intended fate, but kept putting it off. Finally he, too, became so
accustomed to ignoring her that he neglected to provide her with food and
drink; she expired, not by a terrible martyrdom on the wheel or in the
teeth of lions (the wheel, in any case, was suffering from deferred
maintenance and might not have been up to the task), but from old age and
starvation. (She contributed to her own fate by putting off any form of
protest, as too strenuous and not likely to be attended to.)
Some time later, Procrastinata's daughter, who had kept meaning to
seek out and rescue her mother, if possible, but somehow never found the
time, was vouchsafed a vision of her mother hanging around outside the
gates of Heaven. St. Peter apparently was always too busy with something
else to get around to letting her in. ("What's another day in eternity,
after all?") Sometime after that, however, he neglected to lock the pearly
gates and Procrastinata, by this time cured of her proclivity for putting
things off, immediately eeled into Paradise. Many generations thereafter,
in about 1963, the Church got around to canonizing her. One day soon,
when someone has the time, she will be added to the official Calendar of
Saints, though that will be difficult as the author of her vita omitted to
note the actual date of her death. Perhaps February 29, to which we get
around only every four years, would be an acceptable substitute.
In the meantime, she is venerated (when they remember) by devotees
of the art of procrastination, and invoked by those who suffer its
consequences -- though the latter, of course, know better than to expect
instant results.
Elizabeth Parker McLachlan, Art History, Rutgers University
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