Emerentiana

Saint Emerentiana, martyr, was a Roman virgin, a learner of the faith, who suffered for Christ about the year 304, in the time of the persecution of Diocletian. She is venerated chiefly in the West, where her feast is on 23 January, and since 1969 her cult has been kept only in local calendars. Very little is known with certainty about her life.

The story according to tradition

According to the tradition linked with Saint Agnes of Rome, Emerentiana was her foster sister. Emerentiana's mother had been the wet nurse and nanny of Agnes, a young, rich and noble woman who was martyred because she refused an engagement on account of her Christian faith. The two grew up together and, according to some sources, Emerentiana was a servant in the house of Agnes.

A few days after the death of Agnes, Emerentiana, who was still a catechumen and had not received baptism, went to pray at her tomb. There she was met by pagans, who had attacked the believers who came to pray, and the Serbian tradition says they drove them off with stones. Emerentiana was left alone, confessed that she was a Christian and a relative of Agnes, and rebuked those who stoned innocent people. The crowd, enraged, stoned her to death. In the West it is said that she thus received the baptism of blood. In the Serbian account, at the moment of her martyrdom there came a strong earthquake, lightning and thunder, and most of her killers perished.

Veneration

There was indeed a Roman martyr named Emerentiana, whose veneration is very ancient, as the martyrologies of Jerome, Bede and others attest, but not even the date of her death is known. Formerly, in the martyrology of Jerome, she was commemorated on 16 September. In the nineteenth century Mariano Armellini discovered her crypt in the catacombs.

She is shown as a young girl with stones in her lap and lilies in her hand, or as being stoned to death by a mob. Her tomb is in the church of Sant'Agnese fuori le mura in Rome, and an altar with a marble relief by Ercole Ferrata showing her martyrdom is in Sant'Agnese in Agone. She is invoked against stomach pains.