St. Andrew

St. Andrew the Apostle was a fisherman from Bethsaida in Galilee and the brother of Simon Peter. A disciple first of John the Baptist, he heard the Baptist point to Jesus as the Lamb of God, followed the Lord, and then went straight to his brother with the words, 'We have found the Messiah' (John 1:41), bringing Peter to Jesus. Because he was among the very first to follow Christ, the Greek tradition honors him as the Protokletos, 'the First-Called.' The Gospels show him close to the Lord at telling moments: it is Andrew who brings forward the boy with the five loaves and two fish before the feeding of the five thousand, and Andrew who, with Philip, presents to Jesus the Greeks who wished to see Him. Of his life after Pentecost the New Testament says nothing, but ancient tradition, reported by Origen and Eusebius, holds that Andrew preached the Gospel in the lands around the Black Sea — Scythia, in the region of modern Ukraine and Russia — and in Greece. From these traditions he came to be honored as the founder-apostle of the see of Byzantium, and he remains the patron of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, a bond the Catholic Church recalls each year when a papal delegation visits the Patriarchate on his feast. According to tradition, Andrew was martyred by crucifixion at Patras in Greece around the year 60. The familiar detail that he was bound to an X-shaped cross — the crux decussata, or 'St. Andrew's cross' — comes from later accounts and cannot be historically verified, but it shaped his iconography and gives Scotland's flag its white saltire. Hagiographical accounts relate that he preached from the cross for days before dying. Venerated from the earliest centuries, long before formal canonization processes, Andrew is invoked as patron of Scotland, Greece, Russia, and Ukraine, and of fishermen. His relics, translated to Constantinople in the fourth century, are now venerated chiefly at the cathedral of Amalfi in Italy, while his head, long kept at St. Peter's in Rome, was returned by Pope Paul VI to Patras in 1964 as a gesture of reconciliation with the Orthodox Church; pilgrims venerate it there in the great Basilica of St. Andrew. His feast on November 30 anchors the Church's calendar: the First Sunday of Advent is the Sunday nearest his feast day.