Saints Perpetua and Felicity were young women in Carthage around 181-203 AD.

Perpetua was a rich young wife in Carthage, who had just given birth to a son. Felicity was Perpetua’s slave, and was about to have a baby of her own.

Perpetua’s mother and brothers were Christian, but her father was a pagan. So when Perpetua told her father she wanted to be baptized, he flew into a rage. “Why can’t you just keep your faith secret?” he asked her. “Don’t you know you can be killed for becoming a Christian?”

“Do you see this jar of water on the table?” Perpetua asked him. “Can you call it anything but a jar of water? Can you call it a hurricane? Or an elephant?” “No,” her father said.

“I’m a Christian,” Perpetua told him. “I can’t call myself anything else.”

Her father was so angry he didn’t talk with her for days. While he still wasn’t speaking to her, Perpetua was baptized, along with Felicity and several other slaves. And just as Perpetua’s father feared, when the Roman rulers heard about it, Perpetua and her friends were all arrested, along with her teacher, Saturus.

The prison they were thrown in was hot and dark. The guards pushed and shoved the prisoners, even Felicity, who was about to give birth. Worst of all, they took Perpetua’s baby son away from her. She wasn’t allowed to see him until her mother and brother brought the child to her so she could nurse him.

Nobody knew what was going to happen next. Would they be set free? Would they be killed? “You should ask God for a vision,” Perpetua’s brother told her.

So Perpetua prayed, and that night God gave her a dream. In the dream, she saw a huge bronze ladder. All along it were swords, spears, hooks, and knives. The only possible way to climb it was to always look up, never down. If someone looked away for even a moment, they’d be torn apart. At the bottom of the ladder was a giant serpent, ready to bite anyone who tried to climb.

Saturus, Perpetua and Felicity’s teacher, was in the dream too. He started to climb up the ladder. “Don’t let the snake bit you,” he called back to Perpetua. “It will not hurt me,” Perpetua said. “In the name of Jesus Christ.”

When the snake heard that name, it bowed its head, afraid. So instead of stepping on the first rung of the ladder, Perpetua stepped on the snake’s head. Then she climbed all the way up the ladder, to a beautiful garden. It was full of thousands of people dressed in white. “Welcome, child,” a man said, and handed her a bowl of sweet milk. Perpetua could still taste the sweetness when she woke up.

But when she told her brother the vision, they both knew what it meant: she wouldn’t be set free. She would be killed for her faith.

Perpetua’s father came to visit her in jail, weeping. “Have pity on my gray hairs,” he said kissing her hands. “You’ve always been my favorite. Why don’t you just give up your faith?”

“We don’t live in our own power,” Perpetua told him, “but in the power of God.”

When Perpetua and Felicity and their friends were put on trial, her father came, holding her baby.

“Just give a sacrifice for the emperor,” he said. “And this can all be over. Come home and raise your son.”

The judge didn’t want to sentence Perpetua to death, either. “Why don’t you just do as your father says?” he asked.

But Perpetua and Felicity and their friends refused to deny their faith, so all of them were sentenced to death.

In the prison, it came time for Felicity to deliver her child. While the jailers made fun of her, in that hot, dark cell, she went into labor and gave birth to a beautiful daughter. Because Felicity couldn’t care for her little girl, she gave her to a free Christian woman, who promised to adopt her.

The judge decreed that Felicity, Perpetua, and their friends should all be killed just two days later, during a feast in the amphitheater, in front of thousands of people who thought that seeing them die was nothing more than watching a game.

Waiting in prison, Perpetua had another dream. She dreamed that when she was taken into the amphitheater, she turned into a man. Another man was there to fight her. He tried to trip her, but she kicked him in the face. As she rained blows down on his head, she realized she wasn’t even touching the ground anymore: she was flying. And when she won the fight, she was given a branch as a reward.

Saturus had a dream in the prison as well. He dreamed that they were transported by four angels to a beautiful garden, where there were rose trees as big as cypresses, with leaves that sang. In the garden were other people who had been killed for their faith, and a building with walls made of light, where they met a man with a white head, surrounded by four elders.

The day of the feast, Perpetua went to the amphitheater with her friends, signing.

“You judge us,” they told the people who had come to watch them die. “But God judges you.”

First, the men were led into the ring with wild beasts. Perpetua and Felicity watched as their friends were torn apart by leopards, bears, and a wild boar. They crowd loved it.

But when Perpetua and Felicity were brought out, the crowd fell silent. They were shocked to see the young mothers stripped and in danger of being trampled by a wild cow. So before the cow could kill them, Perpetua and Felicity were taken out of the ring.

Perpetua was in an ecstasy, a trance of faith so deep that she didn’t realize anything had happened to her. “When are we to be thrown to the beasts?” she asked.

Her friends and her brother, who had been watching, showed her wounds to her to prove that she had already been sent into the ring. Before they dragged Perpetua and Felicity back out, she said her last words to her brother: “Stand fast in faith,” she told him. “And love one another.”

Then Felicity and Perpetua were sent back into the ring. In the ring, a solider had been ordered to kill them by the sword. But the soldier was young. He didn’t know what he was doing, so when he stabbed Perpetua, she cried out in pain, but she wasn’t killed.

Finally, Perpetua placed the blade on the neck herself. The young soldier sliced her throat, and she died.

But her story wasn’t over, because she had written it down while she was in prison. After her death, it spread around the Roman Empire like wildfire. Some churches even read it during their services.

And many of the people who saw how Perpetua and Felicity died became Christians – even the jailer who had held them once in prison.

Saint names in Eucharistic Prayer I

The first list begins with Mary and Joseph and then the “blessed Apostles and Martyrs,” including Peter, Paul, Andrew (Peter’s brother), James (“the Greater”: the brother of John), John, Thomas, James (“the Lesser”: the son of Alpheus), Matthew, Bartholomew, Simon (“the Zealot”), and Jude (also called Thaddeus).

The First List of Saint Names

Continuing this first list of saints in Eucharistic Prayer I, as Charles Belmonte notes, “Five popes head the list: St. Peter’s first three successors, Linus, Cletus, Clement; then two popes of the third century, Sixtus II and Cornelius; Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, the intrepid defender of Catholic unity; the deacon Lawrence, who when his persecutor demanded from him the ‘treasures’ of the Church, showed him hundreds of poor people; Chrysogonus, a Roman priest who carried out the holy work of comforting the Christians who were in prison; two brothers, John and Paul, both officers of the [Roman] imperial palace, who were put to death under [the emperor] Julian the Apostate; and lastly, Cosmas and Damian, two Oriental physicians who gave their aid freely, and at whose graves there occurred ‘yet more cures than they had effected in their lives’” (Understanding the Mass, p. 158).

The Second List of Saint Names

As for the second list of saints in Eucharistic Prayer I, we ask for “some share in the fellowship” of several saints who were martyrs. Belmonte continues, “It mentions, in the first place, John (here obviously St. John the Baptist), and then seven men, followed by seven women, all martyrs. Stephen is the first deacon, whose glorious martyrdom is recounted in the Acts of the Apostles (6:8-7:60). Two apostles come next: Matthias, elected to take the place of Judas (Acts 1:15-16) and probably left out of the first list so as not to exceed the number of twelve, and Barnabas, St. Paul’s companion in his first missionary journey. Ignatius is the famous bishop of Antioch, sentenced to be fed to the wild beasts in Rome under [emperor] Trajano. Besides their names and the place of their martyrdom, little else is known of Alexander, the priest Marcellinus, and the exorcist Peter, who were all put to death in the great persecution of [emperor] Diocletian.

The list continues with the names of the two young girls, Felicity and Perpetua (their names form the expression ‘everlasting happiness’), who confessed their faith at Carthage [in North Africa]; and of Agatha and Lucy in Sicily. It concludes with the names of two young martyrs beloved by the Romans, Agnes and Cecelia; and of Anastasia, martyred at Sirmium and later honored in Rome” (Understanding the Mass, pp. 159–160).

All these saints are important because they were among the many early witnesses to Jesus Christ and the Christian faith. These are our spiritual fathers, our older brothers and sisters in Christ, who showed us that our faith was worth living and dying for. They showed us that, strengthened by the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the presence of the Holy Spirit in their hearts, they could overcome any persecutions and sufferings, even to the point of being killed. These saints give us great hope, and their prayers for us give us confidence that we, too, can live out the faith as they did, that we can live our life in Christ every day and look forward to the glory of heaven!

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