January 21
The saints and feasts remembered on January 21, each with a short life, a Bible passage and a prayer.
Saint Agnes
A girl in Rome who chose to die rather than give up her faith in Christ
Agnes was a young Christian girl in Rome who was put to death for her faith, probably in the persecution under Emperor Diocletian in the early 300s. Little about her life is certain. A few decades later, Bishop Ambrose of Milan wrote that she was only twelve, and he stressed how small she looked before her executioners.
Later accounts add more: that she refused to marry a powerful young man because she had promised herself to Christ, and that she faced threats and humiliation before she died. These stories disagree with one another, and historians treat them as legend built around a real martyrdom.
She was buried beside the Via Nomentana. A church rose near her grave in the 300s; the one standing there today comes from a rebuilding in the 600s. Christians remember Agnes because a child with no power held on to Christ when the empire demanded she let go. Her name sounds like the Latin agnus, “lamb,” so lambs are blessed at her church each year.
But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.
1 Corinthians 1:27 · BSB
A prayer
Faithful God, you gave the young martyr Agnes courage to stay true to Christ when the powerful of her world demanded she deny him. Give us, whatever our age or weakness, a faith that does not bend to fear, so that we may belong to you with our whole heart. Amen.
The lives are written with AI help from public-domain histories and checked before publishing; the prayers are ours. Bible quotations are from the Berean Standard Bible (BSB), in the public domain. How we write.