However, evidence attests to widespread devotion even prior to this time: St. Remigius of Rheims was buried in in a church dedicated to St. Christopher; Pope St. Gregory the Great d. Isidore of Seville d. Moreover, medals of St. Christopher and car medalions or pins are still manufactured and used by the faithful. Originally named Offerus, he carried people across the river for his livelihood. He converted from paganism through the teaching of a hermit named Babylas.
Christopher believed that our Lord was the most powerful of all, more powerful than any man and one whom even Satan feared. One day, again according to the legend, Christopher picked up a fairly significant passenger—a small child.
The child then revealed himself as Jesus, and the heaviness was due to the weight of the world that he carried on his shoulders. Christopher was a tough cookie until the end: according to the Roman Martyrology, he was executed during the reign of Emperor Decius by being shot with arrows after surviving burning.
One man who celebrates that day with enthusiasm is Father Christopher Smith, the rector of Christ Cathedral. He recalled a popular custom among Southern California junior high and high school students that involved exchanging colorful enamelled Saint Christopher medals as tokens of affection between boys and girls. I always give one to our visiting priests when they come to us from different countries.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have had an upward effect on sales of St. Christopher paraphernalia, said Clara Romera, who with her husband, Samuel, owns St. Christopher has saved a lot of soldiers. To begin with, the church never de-sanctified Christopher, whose annual feast day was July Rather, it busted him, in the military sense, relegating him to a lower rank on the liturgical calendar, in large part because of his wobbly historical status.
In the s, the reformist Vatican Council II undertook to tidy things up and make the overloaded calendar leaner and more relevant to the far-flung peoples in the modern church. Along with many other saints, Christopher was kicked off the universal calendar in , although individual parishes or localities were still free to celebrate his feast day.
William B. Smith, academic dean of St. In recent years, an Irish historian, after careful scrutiny of Roman Empire records and early church writings, has argued that the existence of St.
Menas, an early Egyptian martyr. The earliest Greek and Latin texts, Woods contends, show that Christopher was a member of a tribe from western Egypt in what is now Libya.
0コメント