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Saint Anysia of Thessalonica

Run through by a soldier when she would not go to the pagan sacrifice

Western calendar
Not kept
Orthodox calendar
30 December (12 January on the old calendar)

Anysia lived at Thessalonica under the co-emperor Maximian, and when her Christian parents died she sold all she had, gave it to the poor and lived in fasting, vigil and prayer. Maximian had decreed that anyone might kill a Christian without fear of punishment, and one day on her way to church a pagan soldier stopped her and ordered her to come and sacrifice at the festival of the sun. When he tried to tear the veil from her head she pushed him away, saying "My Lord Jesus Christ forbids you!", and he ran her through with his sword; the Christians buried her near the city gates and built a chapel over her grave.

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Feast days, two calendars and patron saints

A saint’s feast day is the day each year when the Church remembers that saint in its worship, and for most saints it is the day they died. These are among the oldest days in the Christian year: after Easter and Pentecost, and Christmas and Epiphany in the fourth century, the next feasts the Church kept were those of the apostles and the martyrs.

Many saints have two dates in the finder because the Western and Orthodox Churches built their calendars separately over many centuries. Sometimes they remember the same saint on different days: the West keeps Saint Jude with Saint Simon on 28 October, while the Orthodox keep him on 19 June. Some Orthodox churches, such as the Russian Church, also still follow the old Julian calendar, which now runs thirteen days behind the one on our walls, so their 6 December falls on our 19 December. Where that happens the finder gives both dates.

A patron saint is a saint the Church has come to ask for help in a particular place, work or need, “a special intercessor with God and the proper advocate”, as the old Catholic Encyclopedia puts it. Some patronages were declared by a pope, as when Pius IX named Saint Joseph patron of the whole Church in 1870; most grew from long tradition, as with Saint Anthony and the things we lose.

We chose the first two hundred saints by what people search for most, by name, by need and by date, and added the saints Orthodox Christians look for and the apostles. Then we added a saint for each of the 138 days that still had none, so every day of the year now has at least one, and forty more of the saints people search for: 378 entries in all. Every fact in an entry comes from a source we checked and name under it: the Catholic Encyclopedia, the Orthodox Church in America’s lives of the saints, Vatican News and the Holy See’s own documents. Where a saint’s story comes to us mostly from legend, the entry says so.