The cult of St George and patronage of St Ursula

George Francis Vella proceeded with his wishful thinking (April 30) about St George, little knowing that with his writing he is belittling and not exalting his patron saint.

It is totally false to assert that Emperor Constantine built a basilica over the tomb of St George in Lydda. Eusebius, the eminent church historian in his Life Of Constantine and other writings (mostly available online) lists the churches raised by the emperor with details. Neither the name of St George, nor a church in his honour figures in his biography or in any other writing of his and other contemporary historians.

It is also fallacious to mix fact with fiction. It is a fact referred to in my previous correspondence that the cult of the saint is first encountered under Emperor Justinian and that he sustained it; but the story that he offered a relic of the saint to the bishop of Paris is nothing but a mediaeval creation. It is illogical to say that because Malta and Gozo passed under the Byzantine sphere during Justinian's reign, therefore, the cult of the saint, then still at its grassroots, reached the islands as well. Even in nearby Sicily, a Byzantine possession at the same time of Malta and Gozo, his cult did not crop up until the 12th century.

It is fully acknowledged that the Byzantines nurtured and still nurture a deep devotion to St George, but this does not necessarily mean that his cult flourished in Byzantine possessions. It was returning crusaders who popularised his cult in Western Europe, especially after the widely diffused story that he had been helping the Franks at the Battle of Antioch in 1098.

It is possible to deceive somebody for some time, but it is not possible to deceive everybody at all time.

Some last few words about the patronage of St Ursula in Gozo. Whenever locusts swarmed the Gozitan countryside, whenever the earth trembled, whenever other impending disasters threatened the island, our ancestors sought the intervention of St Ursula and established votive processions to the church of Our Lady of Graces, to the church of Our Lady of Manresa and to St George's parish church.

When pestilence visited the village of Xagħra in 1814, the Collegiate Chapter put the bust of St Ursula in a sentry box of the Citadel, the one facing the beleaguered village, and was cared for by the Commune of Gozo; the Capuchin Fathers put the titular painting of Our Lady of Graces by Erardi under the portico of their church facing Xagħra, and the Franciscan Conventuals put the statue of St Anthony of Padua in the church belfry facing the same village.

As far as I know there is no particular mention of St George as the patron saint of Gozo during these eventful years.