The saying "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" was first spoken by St. Ambrose. When St. Augustine arrived in Mediolanum (modern-day Milan) in 387 A.D., he noticed that the Church in Milan did not fast on Saturday as did the Church at Rome. He asked Ambrose about this, who replied "When I am at Rome, I fast on a Saturday; when I am at Milan, I do not. Folow the custom of the Church where you are". The comment was changed to "When they are in Rome, they do there as they see done" by Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy, and still later assumed the form we know it in today. [ Firsts | Saints ] (source)
The fifth-century Syrian saint, Simeon Stylites, spent the last thirty years of his life sitting on top of a pillar 70 feet high.
St. Patrick (circa 385–461), who in his youth had been enslaved in Ireland, was the first prominent historical figure to speak out against the institution of slavery. [ Ancient Britain and Ireland | Slavery | Saints ]
St. Patrick was not Irish. He was British, probably from modern-day Wales, and never was in Ireland until he was kidnapped by Irish raiders. After escaping, he became a priest and a bishop and returned to Ireland as a missionary. He was made the patron saint of Ireland due to his success in converting the Irish. [ Ancient Britain and Ireland | Saints ] (source)
St. Patrick was not the first Christian missionary sent to the Irish. In 431, according to Prosper of Aquitaine, Pope Celestine I sent a deacon named Palladius to believers in Ireland, a few years before Patrick returned to Ireland.
The Navigatio Santi Brendani Abatis, a ninth century manuscript, describes the many adventures of St. Brendan the Navigator, who supposedly undertook a seven-year voyage across the Atlantic ocean, eventually reaching what might possibly have been Newfoundland. In 1976–77, Tim Severin, a British scholar, crossed the Atlantic on a boat constructed based on the details described by Brendan, showing that such a voyage would have been possible. [ Ancient Britain and Ireland | Exploration | Saints ] (source)
The son of Pope Hormisdas (who was pope from 514 to 523), Silverius, was himself elected pope in 536. He was killed only seventeen months later. Both popes were eventually canonized. [ Saints | Popes ] (source)
The writings of St. Thomas Aquinas comprise 25 volumes. Strangely, Aquinas stopped writing in December 1273, three months before his death. He was still healthy, but he had had a mystical experience at prayer one evening, after which he was said to have remarked, "All I have written seems like straw to me." (source)
The seven deadly sins (anger, covetousness, envy, gluttony, lust, pride, and sloth) do not appear in the Bible; they were first set forth by St. Thomas Aquinas. [ Philosophy and Religion | Saints ] (source)
The first female saint formally canonised by the Vatican (as opposed to the older, "pre-congregation" saints that were not formally canonised) was Saint Wilborada, canonised in 1047 by Pope Clement II. Saint Wilborada was an anchoress who warned the monks of St. Gall of an impending Hungarian invasion. However, being an anchoress, she was walled into a small cell and unable to escape, and so was martyred by the Hungarians. [ Saints | Popes ] (source)
The legend of the Loch Ness Monster began around the year 565, when St. Columba claimed to meet a water beast at Loch Ness, granting it "perpetual freedom of the loch". [ Saints | Ancient Britain and Ireland | Strange But True ] (source)
St. Edmund the Martyr (841–869), King of East Anglia, met his death at the hands of the Vikings, either by undergoing the blood eagle rite (having his ribs pried open to expose the still-breathing lungs) or by being whipped, shot through with an enormous number of arrows, and having his head cut off. [ Vikings | Saints ] (source)
Many of our Christmas, Easter, and Halloween/All Saints' Day traditions are due to Pope St. Gregory I at the start of the 7th century A.D., as well as earlier missionaries. Recognising that Christian missionaries were having trouble gaining converts by attacking the traditions of the Pagans they were trying to convert, Gregory suggested adopting the local beliefs and customs into the Christian liturgy instead. New church holidays were even made up to compete with Pagan traditions. For example, All Saints' Day was invented by fourth-century missionaries to rival the Celtic holiday Samhain, with its mythology designed to portray the rival Druid gods as devils, spirits, and witches. [ Popes | Saints ]
Slavery ended in Western Europe in the 7th century, when a British girl, Bathilde, was taken as a slave and sold to Clovis II, King of the Franks (638–655). Clovis fell in love with and married her. After the king died, Bathilde, acting as regent for their three young sons, outlawed slavery. She was later canonized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. [ Saints | Slavery | The Middle Ages ] (source)
St. Cuthbert's death shroud, in Durham Cathedral, reads "There is no God but Allah". In the Middle Ages, much of Europe's silk was imported from Islamic lands, and Arabic inscriptions on the silk were often ignored. [ Saints | The Middle Ages ] (source)
Relics of saints and holy people were so valued in the Middle Ages that when Elisabeth of Thuringia, a very holy woman, died in 1231, a crowd quickly dismembered her body for holy relics. [ The Middle Ages | Saints ]
In the 11th century, the aged St. Romuald planned to move from his Umbrian town. The residents of the town, worried that another city would end up with his bodily remains as holy relics, plotted his murder.
St. Thomas Aquinas was once kidnapped by his own family. After an education at Monte Cassino and at the University of Naples, Thomas joined the new Dominican order in 1244. His family objected, kidnapped him, and held him in custody. He escaped, and made his way to Paris. His philosophical system remains the basis of Catholic teaching to this day. By upholding reason as a respected method for extending the boundaries of human knowledge, he helped to make science respectable again in Christian Europe after it had been considered pagan for a long period. He was canonized in 1323, a mere half-century after his death. (source)
St. Joan of Arc started hearing voices and having visions at age 13. By the time she was 17, she was leading the French army into battle, and she was burned at the stake before she was 20 years old.
There were 124 popes (in addition to some 23 "anti-popes") in the second millennium (1001-2000). Only five of them have been canonized as saints. [ Saints | Popes ] (source)
In the Middle Ages, the skulls of saints were used as drinking cups on ceremonial occasions. [ The Middle Ages | Saints ]
Each September and May thousands of Italians honouring St. Januarius flock to the cathedral of Naples. Only 100 fortunate people are allowed inside, where they witness several elderly women mutter and shout at two small phials filled with a brown, crusty substance alleged to be the blood of the saint, who was beheaded by the Roman Emperor Diocletian in 305 A.D. The women, thought to be his "relatives", are cheering him on as his blood changes from gritty brown to a violent, bubbling scarlet. In 1902, a group of scientists at the University of Naples passed pure white light through the material and found that emerging rays were virtually identical to those produced when light was passed through normal blood.
The phrase "devil's advocate" comes from the process by which the Roman Catholic Church, until 1983, investigated candidates for sainthood. In this investigation, one person was given the role of arguing against canonization by denigrating the potential saint on behalf of the devil. The official title of this role was "Devil's Advocate". (source)
St. Anthony the Abbot is the patron saint of both pig herders and skin diseases. The connection is that pork fat was once used to dress wounds. (source)
The man known as the Amesbury Archer or the "King of Stonehenge" was not a native of the British Isles. Tests on the man's teeth revealed that he was from central Europe and born in the Alps. (source)
The only three angels mentioned in the Bible are Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael (the latter of which is only mentioned in the Book of Tobit, which is accepted as canon only by Catholics and Orthodox).