As Jesus carried his cross, Veronica leapt forward and wiped His face, leaving the Image of Christ on the linen.
After Christ fell the third time, the Romans grabbed some bystander called Simon to carry the cross for the remainder of the ordeal.
AFAIK, neither Veronica nor Simon were ever cannonized saints by the Roman Catholic Church (I neither know of nor speak on any other church’s cannonization proceses).
If Simon and Veronica are so irrelevant, how do we know their names?
Veronica is a saint. She’s listed in my Penguin Dictionary of Saints (written by two catholics, by the way)
There are thosde who feel that she was really insopired by a legend, and that her name ul;timately comes from Vera Icon – “True Image” – to explain how it is that an image of the face of a suffering Christ ended up on a piece of cloth. Veronica isn’t in the Bible, by the way.
Simon of Cyrene, though, is. I’ve long suspected that there is much more to his story, and that it’s been lost through the years. I started a thread many years ago suggesting this, at which it was pointed out that he’s referred to in one of the NT letters, and that it’s possible that this is juast tying together a well-known person in the community to the Crucifiction story. I’m not convinced. In any case, Simon is mentioned in the Bible (don’t recall what book, but you can easiloy look it up). for that matter, IIRC, he’s in my Encyclopedia of Saints, too.
St. Simon of Cyrene - *St. Mark says in his Gospel (xv, 21) that Simon of Cyrene was the father of Rufus, and as Mark wrote his Gospel for the Roman Christians, this Rufus is probably the same as the one to whom Paul sent a salutation [cf. Cornely, “Commentar. in Epist. ad Romanos” (Paris, 1896), 778 sq.]. *
The Christian East has no tradition of Veronica. There’s a very common icon called the Mandylion, also known as the Acheiropotes or Not-made-by-hands, of the image of Christ’s face on a cloth, but the story behind it is different – Christ received a letter from the Assyrian king Abgar asking to be healed of leprosy, and sent back a cloth He had pressed to His face, which cured the king. It’s traditionally held to be the first icon.