Happy Solemnity of St. Cecilia! Yes, you are reading it right. It’s not a liturgical blunder! Our liturgical celebrations this weekend in honor of our patroness, St. Cecilia, are in the ranks of a solemnity. The Church allows us to move the feast of the parish’s patron/ess to the nearest Sunday to the actual feast in order for the majority of the parishioners to celebrate it. The celebration is in the rank of a solemnity — same significance and value of a Sunday celebration. That is why here at our parish, we can celebrate liturgically this weekend the solemnity of St. Cecilia instead of the 33
rd Sunday in Ordinary Time.
For more than 100 years, our parish community has sought the intercession of St. Cecilia in living out our Christian discipleship. As a very young martyr, she was a model of perseverance in faith and found her greatest treasure in the person of Christ. In our culture, where wealth, position and power seem to be the measures of success, the life of Saint Cecilia speaks powerfully of the road towards true joy and success, that is the liberating adhesion to the person of Jesus. Saint Cecilia came from an aristocratic family, highly educated, surrounded by wealth and power, but she willingly renounced all of that when they got in the way of “possessing” the true wealth in Christ. This reminds me of one of the parables of Jesus where the merchant is disposed to sell everything that he had when he found the pearl of great price. For St. Cecilia, that pearl is none other than Jesus. And, for her, just like the other martyrs of the Church, Jesus was worth dying for. If there’s one thing that her feast day exhorts is to ask ourselves where our wealth is found. Looking at the hierarchy of our priorities, what/who comes first in theory and practice?
I found this article (from catholic.org) that summarizes the powerful story of our patroness:
“The story of St. Cecilia is not without beauty or merit. In the city of Rome, there was a virgin named Cecilia, who came from an extremely rich family and was given in marriage to a youth named Valerian. She wore sackcloth next to her skin, fasted, and invoked the saints, angels, and virgins, beseeching them to guard her virginity. During her wedding
ceremony, she was said to have sung in her heart to God and before the consummation of her nuptials, she told her husband she had taken a vow of virginity and had an angel protecting her. Valerian asked to see the angel as proof, and Cecilia told him he would have eyes to see once he traveled to the third milestone on the Via Appia (the Appian Way) and was baptized by Pope Urban. Following his baptism, Valerian returned to his wife and found an angel at her side. The angel then crowned Cecilia with a chaplet of rose and lily, and when Valerian's brother, Tibertius, heard of the angel and his brother's baptism, he also was baptized and together the brothers dedicated their lives to burying the saints who were murdered each day by the prefect of the city, Turcius Almachius. Both brothers were eventually arrested and brought before the prefect where they were executed after they refused to offer a sacrifice to the gods.
As her husband and brother-in-law buried the dead, St. Cecilia spent her time preaching and in her lifetime was able to convert over four hundred people, most of whom were baptized by Pope Urban. Cecilia was later arrested and condemned to be suffocated in the baths. She was shut in for one night and one day, as fires were heaped up and stoked to a terrifying heat - but Cecilia did not even sweat.
When Almachius heard this, he sent an executioner to cut off her head in the baths. The executioner struck her three times but was unable to decapitate her so he left her bleeding, and she lived for three days. Crowds came to her and collected her blood while she preached to them or prayed. On the third day, she died and was buried by Pope Urban and his deacons.
St. Cecilia is regarded as the patroness of music, because she heard heavenly music in her heart when she was married, and is represented in art with an organ or organ-pipes in her hand.
Officials exhumed her body in 1599 and found her to be incorrupt, the first of all incorrupt saints. She was draped in a silk veil and wore a gold embroidered dress. Officials only looked through the veil in an act of holy reverence and made no further examinations. They also reported a "mysterious and delightful flower-like odor which proceeded from the
coffin."
St. Cecilia's remains were transferred to Cecilia's titular church in Trastevere and placed under the high altar. In 1599, Cardinal Paolo Emilio Sfondrati, nephew of Pope Gregory XIV, rebuilt the church of St. Cecilia” – Fr. Cary