TODAY'S SAINT: THURS. MAY 12: ST. PANCRAS

St. Pancras

MARTYR

Feast: May 12

Information: Feast Day: May 12 Born: ~289 AD, Synnada, Phrygia Died: ~304 AD, Via Aurelia, Rome Major Shrine: San Pancrazio, Rome Patron of: children; invoked against cramp, false witness, headache, and perjury

He is said to have suffered at Rome in the fourteenth year of his age. Having been beheaded for the faith, which he had gloriously confessed under Dioclesian in the year 304, he was interred in the cemetery of Calepodius, which afterwards took his name. His old church in that place was repaired in the fifth century by Pope Symmachus, and in the seventh by pope Honorius I. St. Gregory the Great speaks of his relics. St. Gregory of Tours1 calls him the Avenger of Perjuries, and says that God by a perpetual miracle visibly punished false oaths made before his relics. Pope Vitalian sent a portion of them to king Oswi in 656.2 Italy, England, France, Spain, &c., abound with churches which bear his name.3 See D. Jenichen, Diss. de S. Pancratio, urbis et ecclesiae primariae Giessensis patrono titular), in 4to. anno 1758, at Giessen, a university in Upper Hesse, belonging to the landgrave of Hesse Darmstadt.

SOURCE: http://www.ewtn.com/saintsHoly/saints/P/stpancras.asp#ixzz1MHTfrodo