Sorry if this has been addressed before, I DID try to search for it, but could never get any results.
I was upstate visiting my sister a couple of months ago, and she gave me a money clip that had belonged to our father. She found it in some stuff that our mother had put away in the attic before she died. It has St Christopher on it. Now my room mate is telling me that St Christopher is no longer officially a Saint as far as the Catholic Curch is concerned.
When Did This Happen?!?
Why?
I am a very lapsed catholic, so I cant just go as my local priest.
Yeah, St. Christopher is no longer a “saint”. I think the Catholic church calls it something like “supression” - it’s like taking away the person’s saint-hood. He was supressed in the late 60’s, early 70’s (I’m really not sure what the exact date was). I guess with historical records, dirt digging, etc. it’s possible to come up with evidence that a saint never existed (this happened to St. Barbara too - that’s another story). I guess at the end, the legend of St. Christopher had the guy standing at 24 feet tall, and he had the face/head of a dog…not totally realistic. The church ended up deeming him a “local cult figure”. Most Catholics are still pretty bummed about this - my grandma still has a St. Christopher medal!
In the readings I saw, it was pretty clear that a man named Christopher existed who was martyred in the 3rd century. The story of him carrying the Christ-child across the river appears to be apocryphal, however, and since it was the basis of his canonization, he was decertified? (unsure as to terminology) as an official saint of the RCC, but individual parishes named after him were not forced to rename themselves (although many did), and sales of St. Christopher medals & statues were not banned (nor encouraged).
In an episode of the original Bob Newhart show, Bob is talking to a handyman. He notices the man wearing a St. Christopher medal, and asks something along the lines of “Wasn’t he declassified?” The handyman replies, “Hey, in my book, it’s: once a saint, always a saint.”
OT: Newhart himself was a practicing Catholic, who forced the show’s writers to change some dialogue that would have indicated that Bob and Emily had lived together before marriage.
“The dawn of a new era is felt and not measured.” Walter Lord
I remember seeing a cartoon from the time of the decertification. It showed a group of haloed men on a cloud, looking bummed out. One of them was whining, “If you don’t have job security in heaven…”
As pointed out elsewhere, there is a record of an early Christian martyr named Christopher, so technically a “saint” Christopher is still acknowledged. However the official veneration was suppressed, as it was based entirely on folk legend.
1969 was the year Chris, Ursula and her 11 Thousand Virgins, the 40 MArtyrs of Sebaste, Catherine, Barbara and a bunch of others got “supressed”.