EVICTION OF SAINTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19604, 5 April 1927, Page 9

EVICTION OF SAINTS.

PLACE MADE FOR OTHERS. CHANGES IN PRAYER BOOK. FAMILIAR NAMES MISSING* [from our own correspondent. ] LONDON. Feb. 23. A number of saints of doubtful historic origin have been evicted from the calendar of the new draft Prayer Book. The most familiar names among them are those of St. Valentine, said to have been a martyred Roman priest—not a bishop, as the old Calendar called him—whose feast on February 14 became for some obscure reason—probably by connection with some forgotten pagan festival—the favoured day for the exchange of lovers' greetings; St. Crispin, the patron of shoemakers ; St. Catherine of Alexandria, a j probably legendary virgin martyr whose ! torture on a spiked wheel is commemor-! ated by the name of a certain variety of firework; and St. Nicholas, the "Santa of our childhood, and patron of sailors, pawnbrokers, and thieves. The only native Englteli saint to be dropped is Edward, the boy king who was murdered at Wareham in Dorset in 978 by the hired assassins of his stepmother, and whose shrine at Shaftesbury was a famous resort of pilgrims in the Middle Ages. The feast on May 3, quaintly named the "Invention" of tho Cross, commemorating the discovery of the True Cross at Jerusalem by Helena, the British born mother of the Emperor Constantino the Great, is excised. Several Famous Saints. It will he a surprise to many that St. Patrick, the Apostle and Patron of Ireland, has not previously been named in the Prayer Book. Several other famous British saints are now commemorated for the first time. These include Wulfstan of Worcester; Anskar, the first preacher of Christianity in Sweden; Cuthbert, of Lindisfarne; Anselm, the greatest English theologian of the Middle Ages; Aldhelm Of Sherborne; Columba of Iona; Oswald, the Northumbrian King; Ninian. the apostle of Galloway and the Pennine country; Aidan; Theodore of Tarsus, the Greekborn Archbishop of Canterbury; and Hilda, abbess of Whitby. St. Thomas of Canterbury, the first saint to be removed from the Calendar by direct instruction of Henry VIII., has, however, not regained his place. No attempt has been made to canonise modern Englishmen; the only name not already generally recognised as that of a saint is Alfred the Great. Several figures famous in early church history have been allotted a place; among them Antony, the founder of monasticism in Egypt; Polycarp, the disciple of St. John the Evangelist and Bishop of Smyrna: John C'hrysostom; Leo the Great, defender of Rome against Attfla;, Athanasius, the .champion of orthodoxy in the face of Arianism; Monica, the gentle mother of St. Augustine; Basil; Irenaeus of Lyons; Ignatius of Antioch. The Middle Ages give St. Catherine of Siena, •' the stigmatised ecstatic who did so much to bring to an end the "Babylonish captivity" of the Popes at Avignon; Bernard of Clairvaux, the preacher of the Crusades; and, most beloved of saints, Francis of Assisi. ESect of a Printer's Error. A perhaps unexpected name is that of Clement of Alexandria, an early Father not recognised as a saint by the Roman Church, and suspect of certain heretical tendencies. An interesting innovation is the establishment of a feast of " Saints, Martyrs, and Doctors of the Church of England," on November 8. The. removal of St. Alban's date from June 17 to June 22 rectifies a queer error in the Calendar of 1662. The latter date was always accorded to St. Alban in pre-Reformation Calendars, and in the modern Roman Calendar; and the best reason that has ever been found for the assignment of the former day is that the Roman figures XXn. were misread by the compilers 'of the old Calendar as xvn.