home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
- Path: sparky!uunet!enterpoop.mit.edu!bloom-beacon!INTERNET!dont-send-mail-to-path-lines
- From: D020214@univscvm.csd.scarolina.EDU (Cecily de Catton)
- Subject: Saints' Days
- Message-ID: <9301031458.aa04116@mc.lcs.mit.edu>
- Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
- Organization: The Internet
- Date: Sun, 3 Jan 1993 19:34:46 GMT
- Lines: 24
-
- Is it too obvious to put in a reminder that some saints have more than
- one day? An outstanding example is John the Baptist, whose feasts are
- June 24th (his birth, the principal day) and Aug. 29th (his death).
- (Penguin Dictionary of Saints, 2nd ed. updated and rev., p.187.) It's
- quite true that the feast day for a particular saint may vary from
- country to country, but sometimes the difference between England and the
- rest of Europe, if you use a modern saints' calendar, is because the
- Book of Common Prayer calendar is a little different from the standard
- Roman Catholic one. (If anyone out there can give me a concrete reason
- for this, I'd be grateful.) Also, maybe it should be mentioned that
- no one day of the year is the day of only one saint. Even Christmas day
- is also the feast day of Saint Anastasia and of St. Eugenia. (See the
- calendar section of the same ed. of the Penguin Dictionary, p. 352.)
- To make matters worse, when a saint's day clashes with something else,
- say Sunday, it can be transferred to another day by the proper authority.
- There are two other possible complications. If there is more than one
- saint with the same name, and the dater didn't include a distinguishing
- epithet, it can make identification difficult. Because canonization as
- a formal process exclusive to the Vatican only dates from the reign of
- Pope Alexander III (who died in 1181), even the Roman Martyology, which
- is the official Vatican list, approved in 1584, doesn't have every saint.
- Before 1181, local bishops could canonize, and there are always local
- culti which are traditional but which have never actually received
- official approval.
-