What We Know About St. Cecilia of Rome,
and Why Women Need to Know Her Story
I took St. Cecilia as my Catholic Confirmation saint at the age of ten. I chose her because she is the patron of music, and I loved to sing and play the piano. As I grew up within the hallowed, yet formidable halls of Catholic schools and churches, copies of Renaissance paintings of Cecilia playing an organ, with a wistful eye on a hovering angel, were commonplace. She seemed to be singing her despair to me. She was trapped within a gilded cage of patriarchal oppression. Though I could not articulate it as such then, I knew our plight was similar, and I forged a relationship with her that has lasted a lifetime.
Stories about Cecilia, Agnes, and the other virgin female saints were regaled from the pulpit during Mass sermons throughout the years of my Catholic formation. I have many memories (most of them disturbing) of being warned of the importance of womanly sacrifice, chastity, and silence, despite the cost. And, as the stories of the ancient Roman female martyrs attest, the costs were dire and usually resulted to violence to the parts of their bodies that had sexual, reproductive, or self-expressive purpose. This reinforced my love for Cecilia. We had much in common.
It was not until I was sitting with my sons in St. Mary’s Cathedral in Austin, Texas during Mass a couple of decades later, that I looked up at a stained-glass window reproduction of Rafael’s altarpiece, “The Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia,” and realized how little I knew about her. I decided I would research what her real life might have really been like and write a book about her.
Researching this book turned out to be a more daunting task than I expected. Though Cecilia is highly regarded in Christian art, precious little has been written about her. All I could find were brief notes about her life in the Catholic Encyclopedia and Butler’s Lives of the Saints that focused more on her baptism, proclamation of her troth to the Lord, and the highly romanticized, yet gory details of her death, than her actual life.
These accounts were based on translations and interpretations of The Passion of the Holy Martyrs Cecilia, Valerian, Tiburtius, and Maximus. Her Passion, or “Acts” as they later became known, had not been translated since the late nineteenth century and, because so few of them were still in print, were unavailable to me when I began researching and writing this book. For this reason, I focused my research efforts on more of the cultural-anthropological details of what a patrician girl’s life would have been like in ancient Rome.
A few years later, when I was doing my graduate studies in theology at the University of Notre Dame, I was elated to find a copy of Cecilia’s Passion in the stacks of the Hesburgh Library that had been translated to English by John Hodges in 1887. I was also thrilled to find a historical account of Cecilia’s exhumation and the roles of Stefano, Clement VIII, Baronius, and Sfondrati written by Dom Prosper Gueranger in 1877 entitled Sainte Ceclie et la Societe Romaine. It is a flowery account that exalts the traditional ecclesial view of Cecilia’s life and martyrdom as well as the historical accounts of the importance of her relics and her basilica in Trastevere, Rome. Though Gueranger admits in his introduction that he supplied historical details to fill in the gaps that were not recorded, it was the only source available with which to try and piece together the later events that brought Cecilia’s importance out of ancient Rome and into the contemporary world. I borrowed from his accounts to weave together the narratives of her exhumation and Stefano’s commission to sculpt her.
Within the rare book archives at the Notre Dame Hesburgh Library, I also found Cardinal Baronius’s writings about Cecilia as he recorded them in the Roman Martyrology as well as Antonio Bosio’s Latin version of her Passion. The most authoritative accounts of Cecilia’s life in ancient Rome were now in my hands. It was up to me to bring her to the modern world.
After poring over these documents and others they led me to, I traveled to Rome to visit her basilica where Stefano Maderno’s statue of her in the repose of her death still stuns the faithful with its simple, elegant beauty. After so many years of reading, writing, and thinking about Cecilia, it was a heart-rending experience to sit in the crypt a few feet from where her remains are interred.
What Do We Really Know About Cecilia’s Life?
Historians debate whether she lived in the second or third century. Church records place her in the 170’s because that is when it is believed Bishop Urban lived and served as the first leader of the Christian Church in Rome. However, this date is also in question. Other accounts place her in the third century, which I have chosen to adopt for this novel, because of her involvement within it with St. Sebastian of Milan. Historically, his service under Emperor Diocletian is more widely accepted as historically accurate.
There have been claims that Cecilia never really existed or was just a wealthy widow who endowed a great deal of property to the Church, because early Church historians, including Ambrose and Jerome, made no mention of her in their accounts. Though this is true, these same Early Church “Fathers” denounced and expunged all examples of women’s agency and influence that were exercised during the first centuries of the fledgling Christian Church. Because the Cecilia who is portrayed in her Passion account is quite vocal about her Christian commitment and enormously powerful in terms of attracting converts, it stands to reason Jerome and Ambrose would exclude her story from their “his-stories.”
In all, I believe Cecilia of Rome was the young and beautiful daughter of a wealthy patrician, whose resources, stature, body, and soul were used and abused by the political and ecclesial powers of her time. As the “Leader of the Chorus of Virgins,” she embodies the macabre pattern of the highly venerated early Christian virgin martyrs. They lived a life of austere self-denial and shame and were murdered because they chose to “marry Christ” rather than be forced to marry older widowers. Throughout the centuries, Cecilia has been presented as a model of female virtue, which has influenced cultural attitudes about the role and worth of women.
My novel about St. Cecilia, The Sculptor and the Saint, will be available in Spring 2025.