St. Philomena

Who they were

In 1802 excavators in the catacomb of Priscilla opened a tomb sealed with three tiles reading, rearranged as the sequence suggests, Pax tecum Filumena: peace be with you, Philomena. Inside were the remains of a young woman and a vial of the kind then read as a martyr's sign.

That is the entire archaeological record, and it belongs in the first paragraph, because the vivid biography later attached to her, with the princess and the emperor and the anchor and the arrows, derives from a nineteenth century nun's reported private revelations, which the Church has never made binding on anyone. The other half deserves equal honesty. The devotion that erupted around the relics produced documented history of its own: a cure examined at Rome, and St. John Vianney's lifelong, insistent attribution of his own miracles to his dear little saint, and her invocation by a crowd of canonized figures. In 1961 her feast was removed from the calendars amid the historical doubts, removed without any condemnation of the devotion. She remains what the tiles say: a young Christian, at peace, whose name means beloved.

Why people turn to St. Philomena

Those who love her already, a large and living devotion. And the young and the powerless, for whom an unknown girl whose only certain word is peace is a fitting patron. The desperate, by the popular tradition Vianney himself fed.

How to ask their intercession

As Vianney did: simply, familiarly, for the hard case. We ask her prayers as we ask any of the dead in Christ, certain of the communion and unbothered by the gaps in the file.