Barbara

Barbara is one of the most beloved of the early virgin martyrs, and also one of the least historical: no early record attests her, and her story survives only in later legend. That legend is vivid. A rich pagan father, wishing to keep his beautiful daughter from suitors and from the new religion, shut her in a tower. While he was away she was baptized, and she had the builders add a third window to her bathhouse so that its openings might confess the Trinity.

Enraged at her faith, her father dragged her before a judge, and after she endured torture he beheaded her with his own hand, whereupon he was struck dead by lightning on the way home. From that thunderbolt grew her patronage: she is invoked against lightning, fire, and above all sudden and unprovided death, the death that gives no time to prepare the soul. When gunpowder came to Europe she naturally became patron of those who worked with it, of artillerymen, miners, and engineers, and powder magazines were often placed under her name. Her feast is 4 December; her image carries a tower and a martyr's palm.

From the lightning that struck down her persecutor grew the whole logic of Saint Barbara's patronage. Because her father was killed by a thunderbolt, she came to be invoked against lightning and fire, and, more deeply, against sudden and unprovided death, the death that leaves no time to make one's peace with God, a terror keenly felt in a culture that prized a prepared and shriven end.

When gunpowder transformed war and industry, this patronage extended naturally to everyone who handled explosive fire: artillerymen, miners, military engineers, tunnellers, and firework-makers all took her as their protector, and the magazine where powder was stored was often called the santabarbara. She is counted among the Fourteen Holy Helpers, the group of saints venerated together in the late-medieval West as especially powerful intercessors in need. Towns, mountains, and mines across the Catholic world bear her name.

In art Barbara is known by her attributes: above all the tower with three windows in which her legend imprisoned her, and which she made confess the Trinity; she also carries the martyr's palm, and often a chalice and Host, marking her as patroness of a good death fortified by the sacraments, and sometimes a cannon or peacock feather. Yet the Church has long been candid that her story is legend, not history. No early source attests her; her Acts are late and follow a stock pattern of the virgin martyr, and even the place and date of her supposed martyrdom vary wildly between versions.

In the reform of the Roman calendar after the Second Vatican Council, her feast on 4 December was removed from the universal calendar in 1969 precisely because of the unhistorical character of the legend, though her veneration was permitted to continue locally, and remains vigorous, in the Eastern Churches, among artillery and mining communities, and in popular devotion worldwide.