Saint of the week: Perpetua and Felicity
- Aimee Boudreaux MacIver
- Mar 12
- 3 min read
Perpetua and Felicity are heroes of feminine genius and courage. In 203 A.D., they submitted to martyrdom because they refused to submit to the manipulation of a culture that valued women like them only for their earthly utility. We draw most of their story from Perpetua's own diary, kept during her imprisonment (it's also one of the first known works by a female Christian). Their story blazes with the kind of courage that makes you catch your breath, and with a deep joy that defies imprisonment, separation from those they loved, and even death itself.
When she was arrested in Carthage for being a Christian, the wealthy Roman noblewoman Vibia Perpetua was a new mother, barely 22 years old. Her infant son was still nursing. Her father, desperate to save her, pleaded: “Only say that you aren’t a Christian. You need not mean it. What kind of God wants you to die and leave your child?”
In reply, Perpetua pointed to a pitcher of water and said, “Can it be called anything other than what it is? Nor can I. I am a Christian.”
Arrested with Perpetua was Felicity, a servant or slave (history does not distinguish, although Perpetua tells us that the two became close during their imprisonment). Felicity, too, was a young mother and pregnant at the time of her arrest. Because Roman law forbade the execution of pregnant women, Felicity began praying not for freedom or escape, but for birth. She didn’t want to be left behind, witnessing her friends walk into the glory of martyrdom while she remained. In the brutal shackles of prison, her prayers were answered with an early labor. As she labored, the guards mocked her groans: “If you can’t handle childbirth, how will you face the beasts in the arena?”
Felicity answered them: “Now, it is only I who suffer. But then, Another will suffer in me.”
One night before their execution, Perpetua dreamed of a golden ladder stretching up to heaven, draped in various weapons of torture and guarded at the bottom by a dragon. In her dream, she stepped over the dragon’s head, and climbed all the way to the top. There she discovered a vast and beautiful garden, which she entered with joy in her dream. She woke filled with understanding: they would be tortured and suffer profoundly. But she also woke with the courage born of hope in Heaven.
They did indeed suffer, from suffocating heat, abuse by guards, engorgement from being unable to nurse their babies, and the deep pain of separation from their families. Still, they saw these torments as rungs of the ladder to Heaven. One day Perpetua wrote, “What a day of horror! Terrible heat, owing to the crowds! Rough treatment by the soldiers! To crown all, I was tormented with anxiety for my baby… Such anxieties I suffered for many days, but I obtained leave for my baby to remain in the prison with me, and being relieved of my trouble and anxiety for him, I at once recovered my health, and my prison became a palace to me and I would rather have been there than anywhere else.”
When their final day came, Perpetua and Felicity entered the arena together. The crowd roared as the beasts charged and gored them before the prefect ordered soldiers to behead them. Perpetua herself guided the trembling hand of the soldier to her own throat. A sign not of defeat, but of fierce hope.
Their joyful witness led to myriad conversions. Christian families adopted and raised their orphaned babies. We don't know much else. But sometimes we don’t need to know everything to know the most important thing: Perpetua and Felicity had hearts stronger than any of those who tried to rule them, isolate them, crush them, rob their dignity. They had hearts alive and burning with hope in God’s promise and His personal, tender love. For their radiant witness to the infant Church, they are among the first and only women to be enshrined in the canon of liturgy.
Tenacious courage. Fierce hope. Feminine genius. Joy that no prison could contain, that no beast could devour.
Their feast day is March 7.
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