St. Christopher

[HagiaSophia]

To those fans and followers of St.Christopher— this should be wlecome news:

"…An Irish academic has uncovered compelling new evidence that challenges the Vatican’s controversial downgrading of St Christopher from his once sanctified status.

The Irish Independent reports that though still revered by travellers, church reforms removed St Christopher from the Universal Calendar in 1969. It said that the Vatican had been troubled by the fact that many stories of his life may have been merely “legendary” and his beatification was the result of a number of different “legends” being cobbled together.

But now, Professor of Ancient Classics at University College Cork David Woods believes that new information based on an examination of ancient texts by scholars has strengthened the case for St Christopher.

The professor suggests that the saint we know as St Christopher was in fact St Menas, an early Egyptian martyr…

cathnews.com/news/408/84.php

 

[DAWNCUROLE]

I had faith. I knew that there was someone interceding for me all those long trips with my family. I knew it was St. Christopher!

 

[joshua1]

As far as I know, the Church never De-canonized St. Christopher. In fact they never discouraged anyone from praying for his intercession privately. They just removed him from the universal church calendar because there was some questions about legend versus fact. The same was with St. Valentine. There just wasnt enough information out there to distinguish between legend and fact. Now that this information has come to light, he may be placed once again on the calendar. Just because he was removed from the calendar does not mean he lost his canonization.

 

[AngelicDoctor]

As a related side note, I was always surprised that there were so few saints in the history of the Church named Christopher (after THE St. Christopher, especially), especially since he was so revered throughout the history of the Church.
St. Christopher (San Cristobal) Magallanes is a recent addition–he was a Mexican priest (and martyr, I think) in the 20th century. Are there others?

St. Christopher is my patron saint, but it always good to have a holy possy backing you up.

 

[Fr_Ambrose]

HagiaSophia:

To those fans and followers of St.Christopher— this should be wlecome news:

"…An Irish academic has uncovered compelling new evidence that challenges the Vatican’s controversial downgrading of St Christopher from his once sanctified status.

It is hard to see why this Irish academic is getting all this praise. What he is saying is simply what is recorded as Saint Christopher’s Life in the Eastern Orthodox Church

**One Saint, Two Lives
**
The story of this saint’s life is astoundingly different, depending upon
whether one consults Orthodox or Roman Catholic sources.

fact-index.com/s/sa/saint_christopher.html

…The Western version of St. Christopher was ultimately repudiated by the Roman Catholic Church, as it was impossible to distinguish associated accounts from any number of probably fictional folk tales. Non-fantastic details of the Western Christopher’s “life” were so scant as to be essentially non-extant. *

This is not necessarily the case for St. Christopher as he is known in the east. While surviving Eastern accounts of his life are replete with miracles and events that do not mesh well with modern historiography, enough information has been preserved to present a possible account of a St. Christopher that would be amenable to modern historical sensibilities.

[the dog’s head]…The first hurdle to consider is the idea that he was a
dog-headed cannibal. This can be understood in the light that the surviving accounts of St. Christopher are contemporaneous. The practice of the time was to describe all people outside the “civilized” (Graeco-Roman-Persian) world as cannibals, dog-headed, or even more bizarre things, albeit often metaphorically. A later generation could then mistake a metaphor or hyperbole for a literal statement.

However, the man in question is also said to have been assigned to a
military unit made up of Marmaritae. The Marmaritae were the independent tribes of Marmarica (now in modern Libya), who would have been pushed to the frontier region after Roman settlement. Since he was from a frontier tribe, describing him as being from the land of dog-headed people would have been a literary convention of the day.

Fr Ambrose*