St. Anastasia

St. Anastasia is a martyr of the early fourth century whose name is spoken at every Mass that uses the Roman Canon and whose day on the calendar is 25 December, the feast of Christmas itself. The oldest and firmest evidence places her cult at Sirmium in the Roman province of Pannonia, in what is now Sremska Mitrovica in Serbia, where she was put to death during the persecution under Diocletian. The detailed life that later became famous, the Roman noblewoman who carried medicine to Christians in prison, comes from an account written well after her death, and the Church has never treated its details as established history.

That gap between a well attested martyr and a much later story is worth working through carefully, because it is the honest shape of what we know about many of the earliest saints. Her name means resurrection, from the Greek anastasis, and she is the only saint besides the Mother of God whose memory the old Roman liturgy attached to Christmas Day.

1. The Dawn Mass

St. Anastasia is unique among saints because she is commemorated in the second Mass of Christmas Day (the "Mass at Dawn"). Her name means "Resurrection" (Anastasis). She connects the birth of Christ with the hope of eternal life.

The connection is liturgical before it is symbolic. Rome kept the ancient practice of station churches, where the pope celebrated on a given day at a given church, and the station for the Mass at dawn on Christmas was the basilica of Sant'Anastasia, which stands at the foot of the Palatine hill near the Circus Maximus. A pope celebrating in her church on Christmas morning naturally said a prayer for her there. That prayer stayed in the Missal for centuries, so that in the Roman Missal used before the reform of 1969 and 1970 the Mass at Dawn on Christmas carried a commemoration of St. Anastasia alongside the prayers for the Nativity. The current Missal no longer includes that commemoration, and the Roman Martyrology still lists her on 25 December.

2. Healer of the Persecuted

She was a noblewoman who used her wealth and freedom to secretly visit Christians in prison, bringing them food and medical care. She is often depicted holding a jar of medicine. She is a model of active charity.

That picture comes from her passio, the narrative account of her suffering, and from the Greek title she carries in the East, Pharmakolytria, which means deliverer from potions or from poisons. The jar in her hand in icons and in Western painting is the visual shorthand for that title. Whatever its origin, the image caught something the Church wanted to teach, because visiting the imprisoned is one of the corporal works of mercy the Church has always named (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2447), and Scripture states the duty plainly. Hebrews tells Christians to remember those in prison as though in prison with them (Hebrews 13:3), and in the judgment scene of Matthew 25 the Lord identifies himself with the prisoner: I was in prison and you came to me (Matthew 25:36).

3. Martyrdom

Eventually discovered, she was burned alive. Her name is included in the Roman Canon (Eucharistic Prayer I) alongside Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, and Cecilia, the seven great women martyrs of Rome.

Death by fire is what her passio reports, and it is what Western art shows. The date usually given for her death is around 304, during the persecution begun by the emperor Diocletian in 303, which fell with particular weight on the Danube provinces where the imperial court at Sirmium sat. Sirmium produced a whole group of martyrs in those years, and Anastasia belongs to that group.

4. What the Historical Record Shows

Four things about St. Anastasia rest on early and solid ground, and they are worth separating from everything else.

First, she was venerated as a martyr at Sirmium from an early date. Sirmium was a major imperial city on the Save, one of the administrative capitals of the late empire, and its Christian community kept the memory of its own dead. Her cult there is the anchor for everything that follows.

Second, her memory travelled to Constantinople, where a church bearing her name became prominent enough that Gregory of Nazianzus preached in a church called the Anastasia in the capital in the early 380s. The relationship between that name and the martyr is discussed by historians and is not perfectly clear, since anastasis also simply means resurrection and was used as a church title on its own. The ambiguity is real and should be stated rather than smoothed over.

Third, Rome had a church of Anastasia at the foot of the Palatine by the fourth century, and it was one of the oldest and most important churches in the city. Historians have long noted that a Roman titulus was often named for the person who gave the building rather than for a martyr, and that the Roman church may originally have carried the name of a founder called Anastasia before it was identified with the martyr of Sirmium. The identification was made in antiquity and the Church has kept it.

Fourth, her name entered the Roman Canon, which is the strongest possible evidence of how seriously Rome took her. Names are not added to the Canon of the Mass lightly, and once added they stay for centuries.

What we do not have is a contemporary account of her arrest, trial and death written by anyone who saw it, of the kind that survives for a handful of early martyrs. The martyrs of Scilli, and Perpetua and Felicity, are the exceptions that show how rare such records are.

5. Where the Legend Came From

The familiar life of St. Anastasia comes from a passio composed some generations after her death, most likely in the fifth century, and it belongs to a cycle of related legends attached to several martyrs venerated in the same region and in Rome. In that narrative she is a Roman aristocrat, the daughter of a pagan father named Praetextatus, a pupil of the priest Chrysogonus, married against her will to a pagan husband named Publius who imprisons her for her faith and her charity, freed by his death, and finally taken to Sirmium and burned. Around her the same cycle gathers other names, among them the sisters Agape, Chionia and Irene, and Theodota.

Scholars who work on the acts of the martyrs classify this kind of text as an edifying romance built around a genuine name and a genuine cult. The signs are consistent: stock characters, speeches composed for effect, a chain of connected martyrs that ties several separate local cults into one story, and a composition date long after the events. The Bollandists, the Jesuit scholars who have edited the lives of the saints critically since the seventeenth century, treat texts of this class as evidence for the devotion of the age that wrote them rather than for the century they describe.

Saying this plainly takes nothing away. A cult does not begin unless somebody died. The people of Sirmium remembered a woman who was killed for being a Christian, and later generations who loved her filled in a life for her because they wanted one. The filling in is a later addition. The martyr is the fact.

This is also how the Church itself proceeded when it revised the calendar in 1969. Saints whose historical record was thin were kept where the cult was ancient and genuine, and the legendary detail was quietly dropped from the official texts. St. Anastasia kept her day and lost her legend, which is exactly the right result.

6. Why Her Name Is in the Roman Canon

The Roman Canon, now called Eucharistic Prayer I, contains two lists of saints. The first, beginning Communicantes, names the Mother of God, Joseph, the apostles and a series of early popes and martyrs. The second, beginning Nobis quoque peccatoribus, asks God to grant the praying Church some share with his holy apostles and martyrs, and then names John, Stephen, Matthias, Barnabas, Ignatius, Alexander, Marcellinus, Peter, and then seven women: Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia and Anastasia.

Anastasia comes last in that list, and she is the only one of the seven whose cult began outside Italy and Africa. Her presence there is a record of how important her Roman church was, and of how far the memory of a Pannonian martyr had travelled by the time the Canon took its settled form. When a priest prays Eucharistic Prayer I at a Sunday Mass anywhere in the world, that fourth-century woman is named aloud, which is a form of remembrance no monument can match.

The presence of seven women in the Canon is itself worth noticing. The early Church did not treat the martyrdom of a woman as a lesser thing, and the liturgy encoded that judgment permanently.

7. Sirmium, Constantinople and Rome

The path her memory took explains most of the puzzles about her.

Sirmium was the starting point. It was one of the great cities of the late Roman world, a residence of emperors, and it suffered heavily in the persecution of 303 to 305. Local Christians kept the graves and the anniversaries of their martyrs, and those anniversaries were the seed of every later feast.

Constantinople came next. As the new capital gathered relics and dedications from across the East, the name Anastasia became attached to a church there, and the martyr's fame grew with the city. The Greek Church developed its own account of her and gave her the title Pharmakolytria.

Rome is where the two streams met. The ancient church at the foot of the Palatine gave her a permanent place in the liturgy of the city, and the Christmas station made her name part of Christmas. From Rome the Canon carried her everywhere the Latin rite went.

None of that requires her to have been a Roman noblewoman. It only requires a real martyr, a real grave and a Church that does not forget.

8. Anastasia in the Eastern Churches

The Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches keep St. Anastasia on 22 December and call her Anastasia the Pharmakolytria, the deliverer from potions. The Greek tradition understands her as one who frees people from poisons, from harmful drugs and from the effects of sorcery, and she is invoked in that character in the East to this day. Her feast on 22 December places her in the days immediately before the Nativity, so the East and the West both keep her memory inside the Christmas cycle even though they fix different dates.

The medicine jar in her iconography follows from the title. In Eastern icons she is commonly shown as a young woman holding a small vessel, in the way that the physician saints Cosmas and Damian are shown with their instruments.

9. Feast Day and How She Is Kept

Her feast day in the Roman calendar is 25 December, where the Roman Martyrology lists her. Because Christmas outranks everything, there is no separate Mass of St. Anastasia in the current Roman Missal. In the Missal used before 1970 her commemoration was made at the Mass at Dawn. In the Byzantine churches her feast is 22 December.

Practically, keeping her feast means noticing her on Christmas morning. A family that wants to mark her can do it in a sentence at the table, or by choosing on Christmas Day to do the thing her story is about, which is to remember somebody who is locked up, cut off or forgotten.

10. Patronage and Devotion

St. Anastasia is invoked against poisons, a patronage that comes directly from her Greek title Pharmakolytria. She is also traditionally named as a patron of weavers, and she is invoked by widows, both of which come from details in her passio rather than from any independent record. Where a patronage grows out of the legend, it is fair to say so, and it does not make the intercession less real; the Church's practice of asking a saint's prayers rests on the communion of saints rather than on the biography.

Her devotion is strongest in three places: in the Byzantine churches, where her feast is her own; in Serbia and the wider Balkans, where Sirmium lies; and in Rome, at the basilica of Sant'Anastasia al Palatino, which remains a titular church of the Roman Church. In the Latin West outside Rome her devotion is mostly carried by the Canon of the Mass, which is a quiet but very durable way to be remembered.

The Catholic practice of asking the saints to pray for us is set out on our page on the saints and how the Church recognises them.

11. Why the Church Holds Her Up

The Church holds up St. Anastasia for two reasons, and they are not the same reason.

The first is martyrdom. The Catechism calls martyrdom the supreme witness given to the truth of the faith, the witness of a Christian who bears witness even unto death (CCC 2473). A martyr is the one Christian argument that cannot be answered with a counter-argument. Anastasia's name in the Canon puts that witness in front of the whole Church at the moment of the Eucharist, next to the apostles.

The second is the works of mercy. Whatever the historical value of the details, the Church chose to remember her as the woman who went to the prison, and that choice was itself a teaching. The prisoners she is said to have visited were people the state had already written off. Christ said that going to them is going to him (Matthew 25:36), and the Catechism lists visiting the imprisoned among the corporal works of mercy that every Christian owes (CCC 2447).

Placing her on Christmas Day joins the two. The Nativity is God arriving in a body, in poverty, under a census, in a province that would later kill him. A martyr's memory on that morning says what the Incarnation is for.

12. What to Take From St. Anastasia

Three concrete things.

Go where people are shut in. Prison ministry, hospital visiting, and the far more ordinary work of visiting an elderly relative who cannot leave the house are the same work. Most dioceses run a prison chaplaincy that takes volunteers, and most parishes know exactly who on the street has not been visited in a month.

Hold your faith and your facts separately. Anastasia teaches a habit of mind that serves a Catholic well: the cult is ancient and reliable, the biography is late and unreliable, and both statements can be made without embarrassment. A faith that has to defend every legend is brittle. A faith that can say "we do not know" about a detail and keep the substance holds.

Keep Christmas with the whole Church. Her day is the day of the Nativity, and the reason is the dawn Mass. Going to Mass on Christmas morning, rather than only to a carol service, is the simplest way to stand where she is remembered. Our page on the structure and meaning of the Mass explains what happens there, including the Canon in which her name is said.

13. Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Anastasia?

St. Anastasia was a Christian martyr killed at Sirmium in Pannonia, in what is now Serbia, during the persecution under the emperor Diocletian around the year 304. Her cult at Sirmium is early and well attested, her memory spread to Constantinople and Rome, and her name was placed in the Roman Canon of the Mass. The detailed life that later grew up around her, in which she is a Roman noblewoman who visits Christians in prison, comes from a much later narrative.

Why is St. Anastasia mentioned at Christmas?

The pope celebrated the second Mass of Christmas, the Mass at Dawn, at the ancient basilica of Sant'Anastasia at the foot of the Palatine hill in Rome, and a prayer for the saint of that church was said there. The commemoration stayed in the Roman Missal for centuries, so the Mass at Dawn before the reform of 1969 and 1970 included a commemoration of St. Anastasia. Her day in the Roman Martyrology is still 25 December.

Is the story of St. Anastasia true?

That she was a martyr is well established by her ancient cult at Sirmium and by her name in the Roman Canon. The familiar story, in which she is the daughter of a pagan Roman named Praetextatus, a pupil of Chrysogonus, married to a pagan husband and burned at Sirmium, comes from a passio written generations later and belonging to a cycle of connected legends. Historians treat that text as an edifying account rather than a reliable record, and the Church has never required belief in its details.

When is St. Anastasia's feast day?

In the Roman calendar her day is 25 December, Christmas Day, where the Roman Martyrology lists her. Because the Nativity outranks every other celebration, the current Roman Missal has no separate Mass or commemoration for her. In the Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches her feast is 22 December.

What is St. Anastasia the patron saint of?

She is invoked against poisons, which comes from her Greek title Pharmakolytria, meaning deliverer from potions, and this is also the source of the medicine jar she holds in icons and paintings. She is traditionally named as a patron of weavers and is invoked by widows, both of which derive from details in her later legend rather than from independent historical record.

Why is St. Anastasia named in the Roman Canon?

Her name appears in the second list of saints in the Roman Canon, the Nobis quoque peccatoribus, among seven women martyrs: Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia and Anastasia. She is the only one of the seven whose cult began outside Italy and Africa, and her inclusion reflects the importance of her ancient church in Rome and the reach her memory had achieved by the time the Canon reached its settled form.