Saint Faith

Saint Faith or Saint Faith of Conques (Latin: Sancta Fides; French: Sainte-Foy; Spanish: Santa Fe) is a saint who is said to have been a girl or young woman of Agen in Aquitaine. Her legend recounts how she was arrested during persecution of Christians by the Roman Empire and refused to make pagan sacrifices even under torture. Saint Faith was tortured to death with a red-hot brazier. Her death is sometimes said to have occurred in the year 287 or 290, sometimes in the large-scale persecution under Diocletian beginning in 303. She is listed as Sainte Foy, "Virgin and Martyr", in the martyrologies. The center of her veneration was transferred to the Abbey of Sainte-Foy, Conques, where her relics arrived in the ninth century, stolen from Agen by a monk from the Abbey nearby at Conques. A number of legends exist regarding Faith, and she was confused with the three legendary sisters known as Faith, Hope, and Charity. She is recorded in the Martyrologium Hieronymianum under October 6, but the date of her death is not given. A Passio, now lost, once existed, and appears in summarized form in the ninth-century martyrology of Florus of Lyon. Her legends portray her as a patron who could turn against those who only gave small donations to her church at Conques. It is believed that Saint Faith, a young girl from Agen, was martyred at the end of third or beginning of the fourth century, in which she was tortured over a brazier. The first extant reference to the martyrdom of Faith exists in the late sixth-century manuscript copy of the martyrology of Jerome, who died in 420, in which her feast day is listed as 6 October. Faith's martyrdom was later recounted in the Passio in the mid-ninth-century. In the fifth century, Dulcitius, bishop of Agen, ordered the construction of a basilica dedicated to her, later restored in the 8th century and enlarged in the 15th. It was demolished in 1892 due to an urban planning effort at Agen. The center of her cult was not the basilica but the abbatial church of Saint Foy at Conques. In the year 866, her remains had been transferred to Conques, which was along the pilgrimage route to Compostela. Her cult, centered at the Abbatiale Sainte-Foy de Conques, spread along the pilgrim routes on the Way of St. James—and beyond, for her cult became popular in England, Italy, and South America. In c. 1105, a priory dedicated to Saint Faith was erected in Horsham, a village in Norfolk, by Robert and Sybil Fitzwalter, in which murals of Saint Faith have survived, discovered in 1969 hidden behind a refectory wall. The gilded reliquary at Conques was described in Bernard of Angers's Book of Miracles of Sainte Foi, about 1010. Bernard of Anger's Book of Miracles of Sainte Foy provides an insightful testimony of his reaction towards Sainte Foy as a Medieval cleric and his ambivalent attitude towards reliquaries in general. His change in attitude came when he witnessed an "economically charged " in which another cleric, Odalric, claimed he was beaten by Sainte Foy. Thus, Bernard of Angers believed that Sainte Foy punishes non-believers, and, despite previously attacking the statue, he justified his newfound devotion by stating that the idol was a "vehicle to the saint and not the saint herself." It has since been repeatedly adapted and enriched, into the nineteenth century. The head itself, made of a different gold from the body—which is fashioned of thin plates over a yew wood—has been tentatively identified as an imperial portrait of the Later Roman Empire. Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has alternately theorized that the life-size golden face is a portrait or death mask of Charlemagne. Part of her relics were moved to the monastery of Sant Cugat in Catalonia in 1365. However, the reliquary can be seen in the Abbey at Conques, in France. Important churches were also dedicated to her at Conches-en-Ouche in Normandy and at Sélestat, in Alsace (see St. Faith's Church, Sélestat).