Saint Lucy of Syracuse , Her feast day in the West is December 13, by the unreformed Julian calendar the longest night of the year; she is the patron saint of blindness. She is one of seven women, excluding the Blessed Virgin Mary, commemorated by name in the Canon of the Mass. Her veneration spread to Rome, so that by the 6th century the whole Church recognized her courage in defense of the faith. All the details are conventional ones also associated with other female martyrs of the early 4th century.
Her Roman father died when she was young, leaving her and her mother without a protecting guardian. They stayed up all night praying, until they fell asleep, exhausted.
Eutychia had arranged a marriage for Lucy with a pagan bridegroom, but Lucy urged that the dowry be spent on alms so that she might retain her virginity. Give now to the true Savior, while you are healthy, whatever you intended to give away at your death. If you were to lift my hand to your idol and so make me offer against my will, I would still be guiltless in the sight of the true God, who judges according to the will and knows all things.
If now, against my will, you cause me to be polluted, a twofold purity will be gloriously imputed to me. You cannot bend my will to your purpose; whatever you do to my body, that cannot happen to me. The Christian tradition states that when the guards came to take her away they found her so filled with the Holy Spirit that she was stiff and heavy as a mountain; they could not move her even when they hitched her to a team of oxen.
Even with a dagger through her throat she prophesied against her persecutor. As final torture, her eyes were gouged out. She was miraculously still able to see without her eyes. In paintings and statues, St. Lucy is frequently shown holding her eyes on a golden plate. Lucy was represented in Gothic art holding a dish with two eyes on it. She has instructed Virgil to guide Dante through Hell and Purgatory. To stay chaste she plucked out her own eyes, a great sacrifice for which God gave her a pair of even more beautiful eyes.
