Saint Of The Day For February, 12: Saint Eulalia
Saint Eulalia, a saint who recalls for us the extraordinary virtues of faith, those we urgently need today
There was a founding saint, Don Giacinto Bianchi, who used to say: “In peace and serenity with an ordinary virtue one wins, but in storms one needs more, and one must be tight and united to Jesus Christ if one does not want to lose oneself”.
Precisely so, and we see it with Saint Eulalia of Barcelona who, despite a father’s desperate attempt to preserve her from cruel martyrdom in an unhappy time for Christians, did not escape it.
The Spanish poet Prudentius recalled her character: Eulalia well resolved
In today’s gospel, too, we are urged to a firm answer, a yes or a no: too much comes from the evil one.
In affirming her belief, without rhetoric or artifice, Eulalia, whose martyrdom is described by the poet Prudentius, takes the ‘bull by the horns’, her accusers by storm! She tries to convert them, she exhorts them.
The poet paints the decisive outlines of a Saint Eulalia of Merida who is most likely the Saint Eulalia of Barcelona remembered today, given the correspondence of the stories.
Saint Augustine also spoke of Eulalia’s heroic deeds
This is how St Augustine expressed himself about this saint: a holy and strong woman.
Yes, only a thirteen-year-old girl, but Augustine does not stop at the detail of age, attributing to her a maturity of womanhood, of adulthood.
Often, in fact, although adults, we have the primordial faith of an infant, but the simple faith of children can in the blink of an eye become colossal, gigantic.
“A few grains of wheat were sown, they yielded abundant harvest and filled the granaries of Christ”, an evocative Augustinian image that makes us reflect on how important our small contribution is.
Eulalia, from whose mouth a candid dove flew at the moment of martyrdom, is a testimony of faith, an unequivocal crown of martyrdom
A story very similar to that of St Agnes and St Agatha who sacrificed themselves as dumb lambs led to the slaughter, where dumb does not simply correspond to not speaking but to a resignation, a total abandonment into the hands of the creator.
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