St Martin of Tours

11^th November is the official saint’s day for St Martin of Tours, who is best remembered for the legend of “St Martin and the beggar”.

Martin was born in what is now Hungary, in the year 316, but grew up in northern Italy because his father was an officer in the Roman army and moved his family to wherever his unit was stationed.

Martin was attracted to Christianity as a boy, although his parents objected. Being a Christian at this time was not as dangerous as it would have been in earlier decades because, since the conversion of Emperor Constantine, Christianity was now recognised as a state religion. This did not mean that it was the sole religion of the Empire, and it was rare for military families to be Christian.

Martin had little choice when it came to his career and he therefore followed his father into the Roman army. There is a question over how long he remained in the army, with some sources claiming that he went nearly the full distance (which would have been 25 years) and others maintaining that he left after only a few years.

The story of the beggar and the cloak seems to belong to an early time in his army career. While on military service in France, Martin came across a beggar who was shivering with cold. He used his sword to cut his military cloak in half, then gave one half to the beggar while keeping the other for himself. The incident has been cited many times down the centuries as an example of Christian charity.

It appears that Martin could not reconcile military service with his Christian principles and eventually refused to fight and shed blood. He was arrested and imprisoned but was later released not only from prison but also from his military duties.

Martin became the protégé of Hilary, the bishop of what is now Poitiers, at a time when Christianity was split between Arians and Trinitarians over the matter of the nature of Christ (i.e. human or divine?). Hilary was a Trinitarian, which caused him serious problems leading to his expulsion in 357. Martin also left Poitiers, wandering across several countries and eventually settling as a hermit on an island off the coast of Italy.

However, when Hilary was restored to office in 361, Martin also went back to Poitiers. He founded a monastery at Ligugé, south of Poitiers, that is the oldest monastic foundation in Europe.

Martin became Bishop of Tours in 371 and founded another monastery, at Marmoutier, in 372. He spent most of his time in the monastery, having been reluctant to accept the post of Bishop. However, he did also travel around France, setting up new monastic communities as he did so. He died in 397 aged 81.

© John Welford

St Wulfstan

19^th January is the saint’s day for Wulfstan who was the Bishop of Worcester at the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066.

Wulfstan was born in about 1008 and was educated at the monasteries of Evesham and Peterborough. He became a monk at Worcester in 1038, where he served as treasurer and prior, and was noted for his dedication to prayer and study.

In 1062 he was appointed Bishop of Worcester and had therefore been in post for only four years before the Anglo-Saxon monarchy was brutally suppressed by the Normans.

Medieval bishops were not just church leaders but also wealthy men in their own right because the church owned large tracts of land from which rents were extracted. The Normans were therefore keen to replace English bishops with their own men, especially as a number of churchmen had fought alongside Duke William at the Battle of Hastings and were on the lookout for a rich diocese as their reward. One very prominent fighting bishop, for example, was William’s brother Odo, the extremely rich and greedy Bishop of Bayeux.

As a result, by the year 1075 every bishop in England was a Norman, with one exception. This was Wulfstan, whose saintliness had impressed even William, one of the least saintly men imaginable. It may well have been that William appreciated the respect in which Wulfstan was held and reckoned that replacing him would be a cause for discontent, of which William had plenty to deal with in other parts of his new kingdom.

Wulfstan remained as bishop for more than 30 years until his death in 1095. During that time he rebuilt the cathedral at Worcester and also ended a slave trading enterprise based at Bristol.

The photo is of the crypt of Worcester Cathedral, this being the only part of Wulfstan's cathedral that still exists.

© John Welford

St Silvester

31^st December is the saint’s day for one of the earliest Christians to die a natural death and yet be accorded the status of saint. The man in question, Silvester, was doubly fortunate because he became pope in the year 314, shortly after Emperor Constantine had declared that Christians were no longer to be persecuted within the Roman Empire. Many of Pope Silvester’s predecessors had been martyred but he knew that he was safe.

The legend of St Silvester concerns Constantine’s baptism. The story runs that Constantine contracted leprosy and his doctor stated that the best cure was to bathe in the blood of children. Fortunately for the health of the local youngsters, the emperor also had a vision in which Saints Peter and Paul told him that a better plan was to get himself baptized by Silvester. This he did and his leprosy was healed, Silvester’s reward being the extremely generous gift of the islands of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica.

It’s a good story but unfortunately it doesn’t fit the facts, because Constantine was not baptized until he was dying, which was after Silvester’s own death in 335.

Leaving impossible legends aside, Silvester’s contribution to the early Church was still considerable. Although he did not attend the Council of Nicaea in 325 which established the future direction of the Church and its relationship to the secular authority of Rome, he did send delegates and he approved the decisions that were made.

He also founded a number of important places of worship in Rome, most notably St John Lateran (the official cathedral of the city of Rome) and the original St Peter’s Basilica.

St Silvester’s bishop’s chair and mitre have survived and are preserved in the church of San Martino ai Monti in Rome.

© John Welford

St Sernin

29^th November is the saint’s day of Sernin of Toulouse, a 3^rd century martyr.

Sernin was born in Rome in about 245. He was sent as a Christian missionary to Spain but then moved to France where he became Bishop of Toulouse. His activities in the area were very successful, but, not surprisingly, his success made him many enemies among the local pagan priests.

Sernin made himself particularly unpopular by building a house on one side of the pagan temple in Toulouse and a church on the other side, thus surrounding the temple with Christian influences. The effect was that the pagan oracles stopped working.

The pagan priests depended on the oracles for their income so they decided to take the only action that seemed reasonable in the circumstances, namely to get rid of Sernin. Without this Christian bishop queering their pitch, perhaps their gods would return to the temple and speak through the oracles again, thus restoring the priests’ cushy lifestyle.

The priests grabbed hold of Sernin as he was walking past the temple and dragged him inside, where a bullock was about to be sacrificed. However, they had a better use for the animal, which was to tie Sernin’s feet to it and send it charging down the hill outside the temple. The result was that Sernin’s brains were dashed out on the cobbles.

Presumably the priests then claimed that it was business as usual at the temple.

© John Welford

St Hilary of Poitiers

January 13^th is the saint’s day for Hilary of Poitiers (in western France), who was a 4^th century bishop, theologian and hymn-writer.

Hilary was a relatively late convert to Christianity, and only reluctantly accepted the bishopric of Poitiers in 350. He fell foul of Emperor Constantius in 356 due to the latter’s support of Arianism and Hilary’s opposition to it.

Arianism is, at heart, the belief that Jesus was subservient to God the Father and had not existed for all time, whereas the Trinitarians, including Hilary, maintained that all three elements of God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – had existed as equals for all time. Despite the inherent oddity of the latter view, it was the one that prevailed and which is maintained by most Christian churches down to the present day.

Hilary’s punishment was to be exiled to Phrygia (in Asia Minor) for four years. While there he argued the Trinitarian case so vehemently that the Phrygians petitioned the Emperor to send him back to Poitiers, which is what happened.

One thing that impressed Hilary about the Arians of Phrygia was their use of hymns in their worship. He therefore introduced hymn-singing in his own diocese and wrote a number of his own, although only three of these have survived to the present day. One of them, a hymn to the Trinity, runs to 70 verses and presumably does not get sung very often!

© John Welford

St Narcissus

The official Patron Saint of the Elderly is St Anthony of Padua, who is in some ways a strange choice, given that he died at the age of 35 or 36. A more convincing candidate for the job might have been St Narcissus of Jerusalem, whose saint’s day falls on 29^th October. As he appears by some accounts to have been around 117 at the time of his death, he surely knew a heap more about old age than St Anthony!

Narcissus, who was apparently born in around 99 AD, was a Greek who was appointed to lead the Christians in Jerusalem at the age of 80, being the 30^th bishop to hold this office. He was a strong bishop who, despite his age, did the job very well and had no time for slackness on the part of either clergy or laity.

During his time in office he presided over a council of bishops that decided that Easter would always be celebrated on a Sunday, thus breaking the direct link with the Jewish Passover.

After some years in the role he decided that he wanted some time to meditate and pray in seclusion so he resigned his office and left Jerusalem to lead a hermit’s life in the desert. There had been some dissatisfaction with his rule, including a false accusation of a terrible crime, and this may also have been a reason for wanting to get away.

However, without him in charge things did not go so well for the Jerusalem Christians and, when Narcissus came back to the city after several years’ absence, he was persuaded to become bishop once again, despite his extreme old age at this time.

Narcissus needed help with his duties and so he appointed a deputy named Alexander to do most of the donkey-work. Narcissus died in office in around the year 216, after which Alexander continued as bishop on his own.

Saints need to have performed at least one miracle (preferably two) before they are allowed to be so named. Narcissus apparently turned water into oil in order to keep the church lamps burning at Easter-time (see picture). He was therefore a practical as well as a very long-lived saint!

© John Welford

St Lucy

13^th December is the saint’s day for St Lucy, a 4^th century martyr under the persecutions of Emperor Diocletian.

Lucy lived in Syracuse on the Italian island of Sicily. She was a dedicated Christian who had no intention of marrying. However, she had a suitor who was angered by her refusal to accept him. He took his revenge by betraying Lucy to the governor of Syracuse, who was a pagan.

Lucy’s initial punishment was to be consigned to a brothel but, according to legend, she could not be moved from where she stood, even when a team of oxen came to drag her away. The governor then ordered that she be burned to death on the spot. However, this did not work because the wood that was piled around her would not burn. She was then killed by a sword thrust to the throat.

Various stories grew up around Lucy in later years, one being that her eyes were gouged out but later miraculously restored. The reason for the eye-gouging varies between accounts, one being that she did this herself so that she would not be attractive to men.

Whatever the truth of these stories, and there must always be a huge element of doubt in medieval “lives of the saints”, St Lucy came to be regarded as having special care for the blind, and also for people suffering from throat infections.

© John Welford