Celestina was born at Rome in the first half of the third century, in the years when the Church of the city lived between periods of uneasy peace and sudden storms of persecution. The little that is handed down of her life comes through the account gathered by Captain Domenico Cini and published at Florence in 1732, which describes her as a Roman matron who lived in the time of the emperor Valerian. Tradition reckons her birth around the year 230; she died young, in the flower of her strength.
Her holiness took the shape of the works of mercy. In a city where to be known as a Christian could cost a person everything, Celestina received into her house the brethren who were being hunted, sheltered the persecuted, and provided for the burial of those who had already been put to death for the Name. This last was among the most dangerous of charities: to gather the body of a martyr, to wash and wrap and lay it in the catacombs, was to declare oneself openly on the side of the condemned. Celestina did it anyway. What she gave to the living she gave also to the dead, and she counted her own safety as nothing beside the honour owed to Christ's witnesses.
In the end she shared their lot. Under the same emperor Valerian, whose edicts of 257 and 258 struck especially at the clergy, the nobility, and the household of the Church, Celestina was taken and put to death for the Christian faith, between the years 253 and 260. Two things persuaded those who studied her relics that hers was a celebrated martyrdom: her body lay in the cemetery which Saint Cyriaca had begun, among the martyrs of that persecution in which so many women gave their blood; and beside it was found an ampulla containing her blood, the ancient sign by which the Roman Church marked the graves of those who had died for Christ. When in the eighteenth century the bones were reassembled, a clean cut was discovered in the vertebrae of the neck — the mark of decapitation, the death reserved for persons of rank. The experts who recomposed the body in 1731 judged her to have been a woman rather tall and strong, of about twenty-one years of age.
Her cult in Tuscany began with a request made by two missionary fathers, Leonardo da Porto Maurizio and Antonio da Bologna, who in 1731 asked Pope Clement XII for the body of a saint for the church of San Marcello in the mountains of Pistoia. The pope granted it, and the relics were exhumed from the catacomb of Saint Cyriaca at Rome. At the end of July that same year they reached Florence, where the surgeon Desiderio Fabbri reverently recomposed them. On 3 September the body arrived at Pistoia and was laid first in the sacristy of the church of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas, and then, by order of Bishop Colombino Bassi, in the convent of the nuns of San Mercuriale.
The following morning the sacred body set out for San Marcello, carried through Cireglio, Maresca, and at last Gavinana, and coming by night to the convent of Santa Caterina. There it rested until ten o'clock on the evening of 7 September, when in solemn procession it was borne to the parish church and unveiled for public veneration. From that night San Marcello Pistoiese has honoured Celestina as its own patroness, keeping her feast on 8 September; Cini's Relazione of 1732 was written expressly to record the sanctuary of relics preserved there, the solemnities celebrated in her honour, and the miracles the people attributed to the martyr whose body rests among them.
Celestina teaches a charity that runs toward danger rather than away from it: a door left open to the hunted, a grave dug for the dishonoured dead, a neck bent under the sword rather than a word spoken against Christ. She was young, and she was not spared; but the vial of her blood outlasted the empire that shed it.
May Saint Celestina obtain for us the courage to shelter and serve Christ in the persecuted and the forgotten, and to confess his name today without counting the cost.
