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Obscure Saints

James_H

James_H

And I like to roam the land
Joined
May 18, 2002
Messages
7,652
In honour of Grenadine Gray's now regular contributions to FT and because some of them have good stories, I've started a thread about obscure Saints. I'll start with St. Frideswide, patroness of Oxford. My old school was named after her - funny name for a school.

She blinded one of her suitors because she was so pure and holy, them prayed to god to de-blind him when he was properly apologetic. Here is more from the Catholic encyclopaedia@
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06303b.htm
 
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I spent a long time telling people that there was never a saint Jane but it turns out there was -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Frances_de_Chantal. She seems a good sort - nothing flashy, no fancy miracles, just drudgery and looking after her rellies. I don’t think you can get more obscure than that
 
Our village church was dedicated to St Firmin, 4th century bishop of Amiens. Apparently only 3 churches dedicated to him worldwide.
 
Thurstan is obscure no more, an illuminated manuscript shows he was a Saint.

A 15th Century manuscript has helped to prove a former Archbishop of York was a saint, according to English Heritage.

Thurstan, who was archbishop from 1114 to 1140, was previously thought to have been passed over for sainthood, the organisation said. A service book from Pontefract Priory listed him in a calendar of saints' feast days observed at the monastery.

Dr Michael Carter, from English Heritage, said it was "unambiguous proof" that Thurstan was a saint. He discovered the manuscript in the archives at King's College, Cambridge and said it was written in Latin. Translated into English, the entry for 6 February reads: "Death of Saint Thurstan, archbishop of York, year of grace, 1140".

The record is written in red ink, which Dr Carter said was a sign of its importance to the monks at the time.

"Thurstan is well known amongst medieval historians and scholars as a figure of immense political and social significance during the early half of the 12th Century, but all have denied that he ever achieved sainthood," he said. ...

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-68179596
 
James_H said:
In honour of Grenadine Gray's now regular contributions to FT and because some of them have good stories, I've started a thread about obscure Saints. I'll start with St. Frideswide, patroness of Oxford. My old school was named after her - funny name for a school.

She blinded one of her suitors because she was so pure and holy, them prayed to god to de-blind him when he was properly apologetic. Here is more from the Catholic encyclopaedia@
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06303b.htm
Click to expand...



obscure????? OBSCURE??????? C'mere and be blinded! :rofl:

Anyway, it wasn't becuase I was pure and holy (although obviously I am) but becuase he was stalkerish and importunate!
 
I am rather fond of St Wilgefortis, although I am not sure she is properly 'obscure'. Actually, she's not an official Saint as such, never having been canonized.

Short version - a devout young woman in Portugal pre-12thC, her Dad tried to marry her off to a Moorish King, she took a vow of perpetual virginity, then sprouted a luxuriant beard overnight to try to put off her intended fiancé. That worked and so her Dad crucified her(!?)


Sainte wilgeforte st etienne beauvais
Chatsam, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
 
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AnonyJ said:
her Dad tried to marry her off to a Moorish King, she took a vow of perpetual virginity, then sprouted a luxuriant beard overnight to try to put off her intended fiancé. That worked and so her Dad crucified her(!?)
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Harsh but fair.
 
Another Saint that's not so commonly known about outside the ME and N. Africa is 13th C. St. Tekla Haymanot of Ethiopa. He's venerated in the Coptic and Orthodox Churches of Egypt, Ethiopa and Eritrea.

He's commonly depicted with six wings and one of his legs detached. The tale is that when he was living in his mountain top monastery, an angel appeared and told him to go down and live in a cell at the bottom. The monks were lowering him down the mountain on a rope when it suddenly broke, and he began to fall. Suddenly six wings appeared on his body, enabling him to fly safely to the bottom.

He then stood in his spiky-walled cell for 7 years, continually praying and stood up for so long that one of legs fell off. The leg features in many of his depictions as a guest star.


Abune Tekele Haymanot
See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
 
I realise that in this thread we're often discussing deeply religious and perhaps more credulous ages, times when education might not have been widely available, but...why are so many saints' stories so, well, incredible? Even allowing for the apparent necessity of providing accounts of miracles for the masses? I mentioned Saint Mary of Egypt earlier, and how it was related that a lion helped to bury her (seemingly because of its veneration for her holy reputation); to me this sounds at once quaint, charming, and so unlikely as to defy belief. And of course there are numerous other similarly dubious stories. Whyever did the tellers of such tales risk the scorn of sensible people? It's arguably bordering on contempt for their faith's followers and would-be converts.
 
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AnonyJ said:
Another Saint that's not so commonly known about outside the ME and N. Africa is 13th C. St. Tekla Haymanot of Ethiopa. He's venerated in the Coptic and Orthodox Churches of Egypt, Ethiopa and Eritrea.

He's commonly depicted with six wings and one of his legs detached. The tale is that when he was living in his mountain top monastery, an angel appeared and told him to go down and live in a cell at the bottom. The monks were lowering him down the mountain on a rope when it suddenly broke, and he began to fall. Suddenly six wings appeared on his body, enabling him to fly safely to the bottom.

He then stood in his spiky-walled cell for 7 years, continually praying and stood up for so long that one of legs fell off. The leg features in many of his depictions as a guest star.


Abune Tekele Haymanot
See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Click to expand...

I probably shouldn't laugh but..... Ha ha!
 
Richard Cole @RevRichardColes

It is the Feast of St Januarius. A 4th C Bishop of Naples, his blood is kept in an ampoule and on this day auspiciously liquefies. A man waves a hanky as a sign to the army, which greets the news with a twenty-one gun salute. I, like Nietzsche, have witnessed this.
Image
6:33 AM · Sep 19, 2024

https://x.com/RevRichardColes/status/1836639747072028854
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31.2K
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ramonmercado said:
which greets the news with a twenty-one gun salute. I, like Nietzsche, have witnessed this.
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Is there a further relay for the message? otherwise the ceremony is taking place very close to people facing them and with at least 21 guns... :dunno:

I am jealous @ramonmercado (although trying to spin it as religious zeal :oops: ) can you say how you managed to see it? And did it liquify on the occassion of your visit? And was Laudamus and Te Deum sung?
 
Even though there is no specific "saint", today's news is that "Pope Francis grants ‘Nulla Osta’ for Medjugorje". I find interesting the manifestations of popular religiosity that are initially treated with great suspicion by the church, but are often then admitted, even if only partially and in in several cases never.
A very particular case is that of the "cult of the glorious Alberto" (sorry, it's in italian, click by right button to translate):

The cult of Glorioso Alberto is an extra-canonical religious phenomenon, which began in the 1950s in southern Italy, and which presents itself as an expression of popular devotion towards Alberto Gonnella, a young man who was hit by a truck, whose spirit would have incarnated itself daily in the body of his paternal aunt.
The cult began and spread from the tiny village of Serradarce, in the municipality of Campagna, in the province of Salerno, where, in the 1960s, a special place of worship known as the "Temple of Blessed Alberto" was also erected, which became a sanctuary and a destination for pilgrimages, especially from Campania, Basilicata and places of intense southern emigration, including abroad.
[...]
The object of the cult is the figure of a so-called "good soul"[4], that of Glorious Alberto (improperly called by his followers also Blessed Alberto or Saint Alberto), a young man who died after being hit by a truck, whose spirit would have manifested itself to the devotees by incarnating itself every day, at the same time, in the body of a medium, his paternal aunt Giuseppina Gonnella. The cult, after its first steps in the second half of the fifties, reached a large following in the following decade with flows of pilgrims estimated at between 300 and 500 devotees per day[5][6] until 1972, the year of the murder of the medium by a disappointed believer. Although drastically diminished, the phenomenon has never completely died down and continues to attract the faithful and the curious even in the 21st century.
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(The title: "Bishop closes church to avoid scenes of fanaticism")

He is not a saint and will never be made a saint (even though they continue to ask for the beatification process today), yet he has moved many more believers than many saints recognized by the church.
The medium aunt who was in fact the architect of everything was killed with a gunshot:

On January 11, 1972, a man, heavily camouflaged and confused in the crowd of pilgrims, confronted the medium and hit her with fire from a sawn-off shotgun: the woman, seriously injured in the attack, died of cardio-respiratory complications after three days of agony at the Annunziata hospital in Eboli[50]. The murderer, who had tried to escape, was identified by a group of believers and barely saved from a mass lynching thanks to the intervention of the carabinieri: it turned out to be a certain Francesco Manganelli from Trentinara (a village in Cilento not far from Serradarce), thirty-five years old, a former emigrant who had recently returned home from Germany, who was struggling as a truck driver and chauffeur in the transport of pilgrims from his area: after an initial attempt to mislead, having surrendered to the evidence, the man ended up confessing in the interrogation that followed his capture, describing himself as a disappointed devotee of the cult of Alberto who had felt cheated by the woman for a failed miracle. Although never confirmed with certainty, the failed miracle, and therefore the motive for the murder, seems to have been the failure to win the New Year's Lottery in the 1971-72 edition of Canzonissima, promised to Manganelli by the medium: for this reason, the chronicles also spoke of the "Canzonissima crime"); according to the opinion of others, including that of the family (also reported in the aforementioned study by Silvia Mancini), there was no failed miracle and Manganelli was instead a hitman acting on commission: the instigators of the murder were magicians and holy men from Salerno who, in this way, wanted to get rid of the woman who, in fact, had ended up monopolising the flourishing market of exorcisms.
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(The Title: "Killed for the failed miracle of Canzonissima", Canzonissima was the show where the lottery numbers were drawn)
 
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