Saint Agatha’s Breasts

Saint Agatha

Giovanni Lanfranco (1582–1647), Saint Peter Healing Saint Agatha

Father Leonard Feeney once remarked that certain Puritan sectaries refuse to pray the Hail Mary because the Catholic prayer has a bad word in it: womb. On the other hand, many of the Church’s most vociferous critics consider her to be obsessively strict — even fanatically so — on sexual matters.

Puritanical (or Jansenistic) extremists on the one hand, and libertines on the other, have both opposed Church teaching from their respective erroneous positions for millennia.

All this is background for a few comments on today’s feast, that of the virgin-martyr Saint Agatha. Here is what we said of her in our Saints to Remember:

Saint Agatha (251): She is the beautiful little virgin martyr of Catania, in Sicily, who was killed for the Catholic Faith.  Her name is mentioned in the Roman Canon of the Mass.  She is also one of the seven girls named in the Litany of the Saints.

Read entire article here:http://catholicism.org/saint-agathas-breasts.html