The Life of Saint Agatha Audio CD

 Title: Saint Agatha
Authors: Bob and Penny Lord
Publisher: Journeys of Faith
Format: Audio CD Disc

Saint Agatha

Saint Agatha is the Patron Saint of Catania

Martyr of the Early Church

Hello, family and welcome. We’re Bob and Penny Lord. In all our years of travel throughout Europe, to write books and make programs, we have never gone to Sicily, which is where many Italian-Americans have roots, and where there is a great deal of ethnic pride and tremendous devotion to these Saints.

Penny’s family is from Sicily, on both her mother and father’s side. We visited there in 1980 and 1981, long before we began writing books, but we have never come back to tell the world about these beautiful people, and their great heritage of Saints.

There are three ways of going to Sicily. You can fly, or you can take an overnight boat from Naples, which gets you there the next morning, but you don’t get to see any of the magnificent coastline of Sicily. Over the years, we have taken both of those routes, but we found the most beautiful is to drive to Reggio di Calabria (Mother Angelica’s ancestral homeland) and take a 30 minute ferry across to Messina. The trip across the Straits of Messina from mainland Italy to Sicily is a breathtakingly beautiful experience.

We drove down the coast from Messina to our first stop, which was Catania, the home of the Patron Saint of Catania, Saint Agatha. Catania is the second largest city in Sicily, on the east coast. The faithful of Catania have a strong deep faith, an ongoing belief in the power of prayer, surpassed only by an even stronger devotion to their patron Saint, Agatha. It’s like when our beloved Pope John Paul II referred to the Mexican people as being 95% Catholic and 98% Guadalupean. The same would apply here in Catania. They are 95% Catholic, and 98% venerators of St. Agatha. She has been with them through thick and thin, always touchable and available. All they had to do was pray and have faith their petitions were being brought to Our Lord. No earthquake too big – no volcanic eruption too threatening, she was always there for them.

Bob and Penny Lord share about Sicily as they explore the life story of this early Church Martyr. She had protected Catania from earthquakes and especially volcanos since the 4th century.