Saints This Month - 16 November: St Lucia Brocadelli of Narni

A few years ago I was on a retreat at a monastery where the martyrology was read in Latin during lunch. On my second day there one of the names read was Lucia De Narnia, which resulted, due to my appreciation of C.S. Lewis' Chronicles, in me choking on my leek and potato soup! Saint Lucy, of course, did not hail from the mythical land Narnia but from Narni, a town in Umbria, Italy. My confusion however is not just a question of falling foul of a homonym. It has been suggested that this saint was a source of inspiration for Lewis and that the character Lucy, a girl that believes and can see many things that other people cannot see, is a tribute to this Dominican saint.

For Lucia had many visions and they began at an early age. When she was only five years old, she had a vision of the Virgin Mary. Two years later, she had another vision, this time of the Virgin Mary accompanied by Saint Dominic. Dominic is said to have given her the scapular at this time. When she was twelve years old, Lucy made a private vow of chastity, and determined to become a Dominican nun but her path to the cloister was certainly not easy.

Her father died when she was thirteen and she was entrusted to the care of an uncle. This uncle determined that the best course of action would be to get Lucia married as quickly as possible.He made several attempts to do so. One of these included holding a large family party. He had invited to the party the man he had chosen as Lucia's husband, with the intention of having the couple publicly betrothed. However he had not informed Lucia of his intentions. The suitor made an attempt to put a ring on her finger, only to be slapped repeatedly for his efforts by Lucia.

Later, Count Pietro de Alessio of Milan began to seek the hand of Lucia. She was rather taken by him but felt her earlier vow to become a nun did not allow her to enter into a marriage. She then had a vision of the Virgin, St Dominic and St Catherine in which they advised Lucia to contract a legal marriage to Pietro, but to explain that her vow of virginity would have to be respected and not violated. Pietro agreed to the terms, and the marriage was formalized.

As the new mistress of the Count's household Lucia had to manage many servants and a busy social calendar. She however made a great effort to instruct the servants in the faith and carry out acts of charity for the poor. The servants claimed that SS Catherine, Agnes, and Agnes of Montepulciano helped her make the bread she gave to the hungry. Her quirks became too much for her husband and he had her locked away for the bulk of one Lenten season. She was only visited by servants who brought her food. When Easter arrived, however, she managed to escape from Pietro back to her mother's house and on May 8 1494 she became a Dominican tertiary. Pietro expressed his disapproval of this in a rather dramatic form, by burning down the monastery of the Prior who had given her the habit!

The following year she joined a house of Dominican tertiaries in Rome and was then sent by her superiors to Viterbo. During her time here she received the stigmata. Lucia did her best to hide these marks but was frequently in spiritual ecstasy. This resulted in a steady stream of visitors who came to speak to, and often just look at her. The other nuns became concerned about her, and at one point called in the local bishop who watched Lucia go through the drama of the Passion for twelve hours straight. The bishop would not make a decision on Lucia and called in the local Inquisition who found no case against her. Her husband came to make a final plea with her to return to him but she declined and he finally accepted her will. He himself would later enter the Franciscan order and become a renowned preacher.

Lucia however was still at the centre of conflict. The Duke of Ferrara, Ercole d'Este I, was determined to build a convent in Ferrara and was determined that Lucia would be its prioress. In the summer of 1497 he invited her to be the founder of this new monastery. Lucia, the Dominican order, and the Pope all agreed quickly to the new proposal. The municipal council of Viterbo, however, objected, not wanting to lose Lucia. Lucia had already been praying for some time for a way to create a new convent of strict observance and agreed to go to the new convent but once again this would not be an easy ride.

On April 15 1499 Lucia escaped secretly from Viterbo and was officially received in Ferrara on May 7 1499. Thirteen young girls immediately applied for admission to her new community. The Duke petitioned the local bishop for some help for Lucia in governing her new community and he sent ten nuns from another community to join Lucia's convent. Unfortunately, these ten nuns were members of the Dominican second order, who were canonically permitted to wear black veils, something Lucia and the members of the Dominican third order community were not allowed to do. Tensions were heightened when one of these veiled outsiders, Sister Maria da Parma, was made the prioress of the convent on September 2 1503.

When Duke Ercole died on January 24 1505, the new prioress quickly found Lucia to be guilty of some unrecorded transgression, most probably of support for Savonarola's Church reform, and placed her on a strict penance. Lucia was not allowed to speak to any person but her confessor, who was chosen by the prioress. The local provincial of the Dominican order would also not permit any member of the order to see Lucia. There are records that at least one Dominican, Catherine of Racconigi, did visit her, evidently by bilocation, and that Lucia's earlier visits from departed saints continued. In response to Lucia's insistent prayer, her stigmata eventually disappeared, which caused some of the other nuns to question whether they had ever been there at all. When Lucia finally died in 1544, many people were surprised to realise that she had not died years earlier.

Suddenly everything changed. When her body was laid out for burial so many people wanted to pay their last respects that her funeral had to be delayed for three days. Her tomb in the monastery church was opened four years later and her perfectly preserved body was transferred to a glass case. When Napoleon suppressed her monastery in 1797 the body was transferred, first to the cathedral of Ferrara and, on May 26 1935, to the cathedral of Narni. Lucia was beatified by Pope Clement XI in 1710.