The holy Virgin Martyr Eulalia of Merida
Saint Eulalia, the most celebrated Virgin Martyr of Spain, was born of noble stock in Augusta Emerita in Lusitania, now called Merida, in western Spain. She was twelve years old when the governor Dacian was sent throughout Spain by Diocletian to compel the Christians to worship the gods of the Roman Empire. Because of the young virgin’s zeal for the Faith and for martyrdom, her mother took her to their hacienda or country house some distance from town to keep her safe. But she escaped by night and went to Merida, and boldly presented herself before the persecutor. After she had liberally insulted him, he threatened her with terrible tortures; and with an altar of heathen sacrifice set up before her, he promised her that she would escape cruel sufferings if only she would touch a little of the salt and a small grain of incense. Without answering him, she spat in his face and kicked over the meal laid on the censers. She was immediately given over to two executioners who tore her flesh with iron claws and burned her wounds with torches. The fifth-century poet Prudentius, a native of Spain, who dedicated a poem in her honor, says that as her hair caught fire and began to burn her head, her soul, in the form of a dove, flew out of her mouth into the Heavens.
The church built on the site of her martyrdom became a place of pilgrimage and she was venerated throughout Europe and north Africa. Saint Gregory, Bishop of Tours, writing in the late sixth century, relates in his Glory of the Martyrs, section 90, that every year at Saint Eulalia’s church in Merida, on the day of her feast, though the trees are quite bare – it being winter, December 10 – as the day of her feast dawns and brightens, the trees put forth sweet blooms in the shape of a dove, recalling the appearance of her soul flying to Heaven at her martyrdom. If the trees bring these blooms forth quickly, it will be a good year and a fruitful; if slowly, the people know that their affairs will not prosper so well. Saint Gregory also says that these flowers help the sick.
In Book IV, ch. 20, of his History of the English Church and People, written in the eighth century, the Venerable Bede mentions Saint Eulalia in his acrostic poem in honor of Saint Etheldreda.
Butler’s Lives of the Saints mentions that “the oldest existing French poem, the ‘Cantilène de Sainte Eulalie,’ of the later ninth century, relates her story.”
There is another celebrated Virgin Martyr Eulalia, the Patron Saint of Barcelona, whose feast is kept on August 22. Since the details of her martyrdom are almost identical to those of Saint Eulalia of Merida’s, modern hagiographers, perhaps because they feel it is their duty to eliminate the existence of as many Saints as possible, dismiss her as a duplicate of the Virgin Martyr of Merida, stolen for the glory of Barcelona. But the explanation given by Holweck in his Biographical Dictionary of the Saints is more likely: that since the acts of the Saint of Barcelona were lost over time, those of the celebrated Saint of Merida were appropriated in their stead.
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