Saint Andrew

The first of the apostles to be called

by Lorenzo Bianchi

Saint Andrew

Andrew, brother of Peter, is the apostle of the Greeks. After Pentecost, his preaching took place in the East, in Scythia in the region between the rivers Danube and Don. Origen refers to this information (circa 185-225), reported by Eusebius of Caesarea (Storia Ecclesiastica, III, 1): “As regards the apostles and disciples of our Savior scattered throughout the land, tradition relates that Thomas was blessed with Parthia, Andrew Scythia and John, who lived and died in Ephesus, Asia”. But afterwards Andrew must have gone to the province of Achaia, where in particular, as Jerome says, his preaching was carried out, and he became Bishop of Patras. The apocryphal Acts of Andrew (datable to the end of the second century and the beginning of the third, but reconstructed by numerous later reworkings, and which Eusebius of Caesarea rejects decisively as heretical) says that even before the definitive residence in Achaia, he preached in Epirus and Thrace. There, according to a Byzantine tradition, he was the first Bishop of Byzantium, the city that under Constantine was to become the new capital of the Roman Empire, Constantinople.
The Passion of Andrew, an ancient account from the early sixth century, tells of the death of Andrew in Patras, martyred around the year 60 (in reality the martyrdom happened perhaps a few years later) under the Roman proconsul Aegeates, who condemned him to the torture of crucifixion. Like his brother Peter, Andrew, according to the story asked to be placed on a cross different from that of Jesus, on an X-shaped cross, which remained the main feature of the apostle’s iconography. Also in this, as with Peter, the tradition maintains with reasonable probability a historical fact: it refers to a method of torture not unknown in the Roman world.
The ancient tradition is unanimous also in locating the burial place of Andrew in Patras. From there, as we know first from Jerome (Illustrious men, III, 7, 6) and then from the Chronicon Paschale from the first half of the seventh century, Andrew’s body was transferred by the Emperor Constantius II to Constantinople in 357, along with that of the evangelist Luke, and placed in the Apostoleion, the Basilica dedicated to the Apostles, where the previous year the body of Timothy had also been transferred. From successive sources it later appeared necessary to infer that not all of Andrew’s body had come to Constantinople, but that most of the head instead remained in Patras. It is to this chronological moment that the legendary story of the transfer of part of Andrew’s relics to Scotland refers (a country that made him its patron and adopted the cross of his martyrdom for its flag), to Kilrymont (now Saint Andrews), at the hands of Saint Regulus, probably originating as a result of evangelization begun in 597 at the behest of Pope Gregory the Great, through the efforts of the monk Augustine (Saint Augustine of Canterbury). Kept in accordance with tradition in Saint Andrew’s Cathedral in Edinburgh, these relics, however, disappeared following the destruction of the interior of the building by the Protestants on 14 June 1559.

Cathedral of Saint Andrew the Apostle, Amalfi

At the beginning of the thirteenth century relics of Andrew arrived in Italy. Cardinal Pietro Capuano, papal legate of Innocent III, brought them to Amalfi following the Fourth Crusade, which, instead of reaching the Holy Land, was diverted first to Zara and then attacked and looted Constantinople in April 1204. Pietro Capuano returned to the West in 1206 and perhaps temporarily deposited the relics in Conca de’ Marini. He then had built (as the sources of the mid-thirteenth century tell us – in particular the Translatio Corporis sancti Andree de Constantinopoli in Amalphiam by Matteo de Gariofalo – and as recent surveys have confirmed) the crypt of Amalfi Cathedral and deposited Andrew’s body there with due honors on 8 May 1208. Probably a part of the skull was separated from the nucleus of the relics on that occasion. It was discovered again first in 1603, during works on the transformation of the crypt, then again in 1846, when it was placed in a reliquary that is still visible.
The head kept in Patras, on the other hand, which in 1460 risked falling into the hands of the Turks advancing in their conquest of Achaia, arrived with solemn ceremony to Rome in 1462, brought at the request of Pope Pius II by the fleeing tyrant of Morea, Tommaso Paleologus, and was kept in Saint Peter’s (in the pillar called that of Saint Andrew) until June 1964, when by the wish of Paul VI it was returned as a sign of friendship towards the Orthodox Church to the Metropolitan Bishop of Patras, where it now rests in the church dedicated to Andrew, erected on the spot that tradition indicates as the place of his martyrdom. Paul VI also donated, in 1969, a relic of Andrew to the Cathedral of Holy Mary in Edinburgh, where it is venerated along with another given by the Archbishop of Amalfi in 1879, following the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in Scotland.