St. Blandina

Who they were

Blandina was an enslaved girl of Lyons, arrested in the persecution of 177 with her Christian mistress and the group whose story survives in the letter the churches of Lyons and Vienne wrote to the East, preserved by Eusebius and among the most moving documents of the ancient Church. St. Irenaeus belonged to that community and that generation.

The letter's own astonishment is the story. The community had feared that Blandina, weak in body, would be the first to break, and she became the one who could not be broken, exhausting relays of torturers across days and answering everything with one sentence: I am a Christian, and nothing wicked happens among us. Hung in the arena she seemed to the others, the letter says, like a figure of the Crucified, strengthening them by sight. Kept for the final day, she encouraged each of the last companions through their deaths like a noble mother, a fifteen year old boy the last of them, and followed them. Even the pagan crowd, the letter records, admitted that no woman had ever endured so much.

Why people turn to St. Blandina

Everyone the room has rated weakest: the frail elder, the overlooked aide, the one nobody consults. Household and care workers, with St. Zita. And she stands on the justice shelf as its earliest woman, enslaved and the strongest one there.

How to ask their intercession

Borrow her sentence when the pressure asks you to be less than you are. And pray for the frail person you know who is quietly holding everyone else up.