Dear Billy,
These are the same questions I had when I began returning, in university, to a more “Easternized” understanding of my Ukrainian Catholic heritage.
The feast of the Holy Protection of the Mother of God is actually a feast that brings together a number of “sightings” of the Virgin Mary extending her mantle of protection over people and cities. There were several of these in the city of Constantinople, others in Ukraine, Russia and so on. The famous miraculous icon of “Zarvanytsia” in western Ukraine is also part of this Protection tradition.
The Catholic West also venerates the Protective Mantle of our Lady and you will find religious pictures and icons of our Lady holding her mantle over monastics and people (I found several in France when I was there last).
The Scapular, as our Brother Vico has mentioned, is also symbolic of the protective mantle of our Lady (Russian Catholics in particular see the connection between the scapular and the mantle etc.).
.The feast of the Protection has a kind of “church-wide, national” status in the Ukrainian Church, the Church of Kyivan Rus’. The Kozaks in particular loved the feast and had special “Kozak Protection” icons painted with the Mother of God extending her veil over Kozak soldiers etc. This was particularly popular in the Baroque era style churches.
The main apparition of the Protection of our Lady that is celebrated on October 1/14 is one in which St Andrew the Scythian and his associate, St Ephiphanius (both of whom are usually depicted on an icon of the Protection) see the Mother of God in Church as the people pray for the city’s redemption from the Saracens/Hagarenes. St Andrew is the one raising his arm and pointing to the Mother of God as she appeared in St Sophia Cathedral - only he could see her.
Because Andrew was a Scythian, he was highly venerated among Ukrainians since the Scythians occupied what is today Ukraine at one point and a lot of Scythian culture was inherited by the Ukrainians, the citizens of Kyivan Rus’. Some even feel that we are of some Scythian background and Scythians are mentioned in the New Testament.
The feast of St Andrew the Scythian, celebrated on the next day, is likewise a “national” feast in Ukraine.
As for who canonized whom, it was only in the time of Pope Urban VIII that beatification was centralized in Rome in the Western Church. But even after that pope, Italian bishops would beatify their local saints for local veneration anyway. I once came across four hefty volumes with photographs of such local Italian beati. For example, Pope John Paul II beatified Bl. John Duns Scotus the Franciscan. But he was locally venerated as such for 400 years in a province of Italy where his cultus was established by the local Italian Archbishop - a tradition that goes back to the time of the Apostles and still exists in the Eastern Churches. Blessed Joachim di Floris is in the Roman calendar but was likewise beatified locally. Most of the saints in the Catholic calendar today started out as such.
In the Eastern Churches, even monasteries may canonized their local saints which have a cultus that is very localized. The Optina Monastery, for instance, canonized 12 monastics who were killed by the Soviets and their cultus is only for the monastery. (Conversely, Thomas More was given the honours of the altar in the City of Rome ALONE in 1575 but was canonized a saint for the universal Latin Church in 1935).
St Andrew the Scythian is venerated as a saint by the Eastern Catholic Churches and there never was an issue with his cultus. The fact that Rome approves of it and has not demanded his name to be expunged . . . canonization by consent.
But Rome has always respected the canonizations of the Orthodox Churches. Upon securing various unions between Rome and the various Eastern Churches, the majority if not all the Saints locally venerated by the Eastern Churches are kept for continuing veneration. Later Orthodox saints have also been approved for Catholic veneration by Rome.
Our Redemptorist missionaries among the Orthodox would insist that their converts keep ALL the Orthodox saints, nomatter how local, as long as they were not vociferous oppoinents of Rome in life (e.g. Bl Basil Velichkovsky who ancestor was the Orthodox teacher of the Jesus Prayer, St Paissy Velichkovsky).
Roman Catholic bishops attend Orthodox canonizations today such as that of St Herman of Alaska. They reverence the relics and icons of the saints being canonized and take copies of their icons home with them. If they didn’t recognize Orthodox canonizations as being valid - then what are they doing there?
And when the Ukrainian Orthodox martyr under the Nazis, St Maria of Paris (Elizabeth Pilenko) was canonized, the Archbishop of Paris, himself a Hebrew Catholic whose mother perished in the Holocaust, told the press that St Maria should be venerated in the Roman Catholic Church too.
Orthodox saints are very holy saints, who lead lives of continuous prayer, very frequent reception of the Holy Eucharist, strict fasting etc. They lead lives in Christ and their miracles show they are truly deified in Christ throiugh the Holy Spirit. They are not to be faulted for the separation of the Churches (a fault that is born by BOTH the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Catholic Churches).
But in St Andrew’s case, he has always been in the EC calendars and on all icons of the Protection. Even if we could have asked him about his views on Rome, he would have been too busy praying to the Mother of God and reading the psalms day and night to answer us.
St Andrew the Fool for Christ, pray unto God for us!
Alex
