She converted to Christianity after burying the bodies of martyred Christians.
Pope Urban is said to have baptised 400 people at her house, where she
was suffocated in her bathroom, a bungled attempt of execution, then
beheaded, she was buried in the catacomb of San Callisto. Her supposed
remains were later transferred to the church in Travesterre. She is the
subject of the Nun’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and many poems.
Handel composed in her honour and more recently Benjamin Brittan. Albi
Cathedral is dedicated to her.
30 November Saint Andrew the Apostle
H
is name is Greek and means
’manhood, valour’. Born in the village of
Bethsaida on the Sea of Galilee, he
was the brother of Peter and shared a house
with him in Capernaum. He was a follower of
John the Baptist and, recognising Jesus as the
Messiah, he took Peter to him. Eusebius in his
Church History said that Andrew preached in
‘Scythia’ (Black Sea region) and founded the
see of Constantinople. The “Acts of Andrew”,
an apocryphal script, said he was martyred in
Patras (Greece), bound to a cross called the
‘Saltire’, because he said he was not worthy to
die on the same kind of cross as Jesus did.
His relics were taken to Constantinople. The
cross was taken from Greece during the
Crusades to Marseilles, only in 1980 to be
returned to Patras. About the middle of the
10th c. St Andrew became the Patron Saint of
Scotland. Legend states, that St Rule, keeper
of the relics at Patras, was asked by an angel to take them to ‘the ends of the
earth’, and he took them to Scotland, built a church and became the first
bishop of St Andrews.
In 832 Oengus fought a battle in East Lothian against the Angles and took
the relics to the battle field, calling on St Andrew for help Legend has it that
clouds formed a Saltire and the battle was won. Oengus gratefully named St
Andrew as Patron Saint to the Picts. The relics – or were they those of St
Columba? - were also taken by Robert Bruce to Bannockburn.
The St Andrew’s Cross or Saltire is also used as a mark on hearths to ward
off witches. The Declaration of Arbroath invokes St Andrew to ‘keep the
Scottish people under his protection.’ The document claims that the Scots,
“even though settled in the uttermost parts of the earth, had been called
‘almost the first to ‘His most holy faith”.
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