—St. Lucy of Syracuse

There was a widow with a glass eye who lived on High Street in Baltimore’s Little Italy. Her name was Lucy Tomaso, and she was an independent woman with no children but many friends.

Each year on her birthday, Tomaso would have a little cake and coffee get-together (with a thimble of anisette for the hearty) in the St. Leo church hall to give thanks to Santa Lucia, the 4th-century martyr for whom she was named.

“Lucy Tomaso is the reason I’m here,” says Willie Matricciani, a St. Leo’s usher who grew up next door to the church. “My father was supposed to marry another girl from the neighborhood, but saw my mother and changed his mind.

“Mrs. Tomaso was good friends with my Uncle Giovanni [Matricciani] and my mother’s father, Domenic Pompa. She introduced my parents, and they fell in love. That’s how she got the nickname ‘Lucy Cupid.’”

Lucy Cupid shot her last arrow back in the 1980s. But like so many things in Little Italy—an urban village of strong customs and stubborn people—Tomaso’s December 13th tradition endures.

“I moved here in 1948, and [Tomaso] was already doing it,” says 91-year-old Lucy Pompa, current boss of the celebration. “It was her birthday and St. Lucy’s feast day. She started raffling off a baby doll for Christmas and gave the money to the church. It just got bigger and bigger.”

Pompa looked after Tomaso as the older woman’s health failed. She washed her clothes, made sure she had food, and passed the time with her.

“I went over one morning,” says Pompa, “and I found her dead.”

In that moment, Lucy Pompa inherited the celebration honoring the saint for whom she, too, was named.

Saint Lucy (derived from the Latin word for “light”) is shown in paintings and statuary holding a golden plate upon which rest her eyes.

Christian mythology says that Roman soldiers were ordered to force the young virgin into a brothel for her refusal to marry a pagan. Lucy would not be moved. They gouged out her eyes, and still she could see.

Carmella Ranelli Walsh is a coordinator of drug and alcohol programs at Springfield Hospital Center in Sykesville. She lives near Annapolis and has been a member of the St. Leo parish for more than a decade.

At the most recent St. Lucy celebration—following a Mass at which the faithful approached the altar to have their eyes blessed—Walsh spoke to a crowd of about 100 in the St. Leo school hall.

She told of deteriorating eyesight, doctors who said the bad news would only get worse, and novenas to St. Lucy for intercession. And she testified (a belief she cannot prove and is reluctant to call a miracle) that her vision has stabilized.

“There are miracles and then there is the power of prayer,” says Walsh, a Eucharistic minister who says she “gets butterflies” when giving out Communion.

“From the time I was a child, I’d heard that Lucy had a gift for helping people with eye problems. I started praying for myself and others, for St. Lucy to please ask God that our eyes would be healed.

“Miracles imply something grand; miracles are given to people who are extremely holy,” she says. “That’s not me. But my belief tells me that my prayers have been answered.”

More works by Rafael Alvarez can be found at his website www.alvarezfiction.com

He can be contacted via orlo.leini@gmail.com