SAINT FEAST DAY FOR EVERY DAY OF THE YEAR

  ST VITUS, CRESCENTIA, AND MODESTUS, MARTYRS (In the Beginning of the Fourth Century.)  These saints are mentioned with distinction in the ancient Martyrologies. According to their acts they were natives of Sicily.  NATIVES OF SICILY Vitus or Guy was a child nobly born, who had the happiness to be instructed in the faith, and inspired with the most perfect sentiments of his religion by his Christian nurse, named Crescentia, and her faithful husband Modestus. His father Hylas was extremely incensed when he discovered the child’s invincible aversion to idolatry; and finding him not to be overcome by stripes and such like chastisements, he delivered him up to Valerian, the governor, who in vain tried all his arts to work him into compliance with his father’s will and the emperor’s edicts.  THEY FLED INTO ITALY He escaped out of their hands, and, together with Crescentia and Modestus, fled into Italy. They there met with the crown of martyrdom in Lucania, in the persecu...

  ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN JUNE Saints celebrated on the 15th of June WELCOME! SAINT VITUS, MARTYR Saint Vitus appears in early lists of Christian martyrs, and probably died during the persecution of Diocletian, which reached its climax in 303. He is a patron saint of Prague, coppersmiths and actors, and his intercession has been invoked against snake bites, lightning and sleeplessness. Chiefly, though, he has been associated with St Vitus’s Dance. SAINT VITUS' DANCE Historically this term has been used to describe all kinds of nervous disorders involving rapid, jerky, involuntary movements; it has also been applied to epilepsy. Today, Saint Vitus’s Dance is more austerely defined as Sydenham’s Chorea , a disease which induces grimacing and jerking in children and pregnant women, and which is often linked to rheumatic fever. Nothing certain is known of Vitus, apart from the fact of his martyrdom. There is a legend that he expelled an evil spirit from Diocletian’s son, though it is...