Saint (St.) Andrew has been celebrated in Scotland on the 30th November for over one thousand years, with feasts being held in his honour as far back as the year 1000 AD. However, it wasn’t until 1320, when Scotland’s independence was declared with the signing of The Declaration of Arbroath, that he officially became Scotland’s patron saint.
Since then, St. Andrew has become an integral part of Scottish society. The flag of Scotland is the saltire, also known as St Andrew’s Cross, and the ancient town of St. Andrews was named due to its claim of being his final resting place. (see below)
The story goes that Andrew, was a Galilean fisherman who was singled out to be Christ’s first disciple, preached the Gospel in the lands around the Black Sea and in Greece and was eventually crucified on an X-shaped cross in Patras.
St. Andrew is also the patron saint of other countries as well as Scotland. His association with Scotland, a land he never sets foot on is, not surprisingly, based on several conflicting legends, the most colourful of which is the story of St. Regulus.
Three hundred years after Andrew’s martyrdom the Roman Emperor Constantine, himself a Christian, ordered that the saint’s bones should be moved from Patras to his new capital city of Constantinople.
Before the order was carried out a monk called St. Regulus (or St. Rule) had a dream in which an angel told him to take what bones of Andrew’s he could to ‘the ends of the earth’ for safe keeping.
St. Regulus duly took what he could, presumably in a swift and frantic raid on the tomb, and after an epic journey, he was finally shipwrecked on the east coast of Scotland. He must have thought that he had indeed reached the ‘ends of the earth’!
The resting place of the relics of St. Andrew are now kept at St. Mary’s Catholic church in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Richard
