Wednesday, February 4, 2009

St. Sebastian

"Diocletian reproached Sebastian for his supposed betrayal, and "he commanded him to be led to the field and to be bounden to a stake for to be shot at. And the archers shot at him till he was as full of arrows as a pincushion,"[4] leaving him there for dead. Miraculously, the arrows did not kill him. The widow of Castulus, Irene of Rome, went to retrieve his body to bury it, and found he was still alive. She brought him back to her house and nursed him back to health. The other residents of the house doubted he was a Christian. One of those was a girl who was blind. Sebastian asked her "Do you wish to be with God?", and made the sign of the Cross on her head. "Yes," she replied, and immediately regained her sight. Sebastian then stood on a step and harangued Diocletian as he passed by; the emperor had him beaten to death and his body thrown in a privy. But in an apparition Sebastian told a Christian widow where they might find his body undefiled and bury it "at the catacombs by the apostles."
Of the miraculous effect of the example of Sebastian, Legenda Aurea reports
"And Saint Gregory telleth in the first book of his Dialogues that a woman of Tuscany which was new wedded was prayed for to go with other women to the dedication of the church of Sebastian, and the night tofore she was so moved in her flesh that she might not abstain from her husband, and on the morn, she having greater shame of men than of God, went thither, and anon as she was entered into the oratory where the relics of Saint Sebastian were, the fiend took her and tormented her before all the people."
Sebastian was also said to be a defence against the plague. Legenda Aurea transmits the episode of a great plague that afflicted the Lombards in the time of King Gumburt, which was stopped by the erection of an altar to Sebastian in the Church of Saint Peter in the Province of Pavia."

I'm not religious at all but I do love old paintings of St Sebastian.

2 comments:

Charlene said...

I wanted to name Sage Sebastian. Cool stuff!

jazmine said...

perv...