Saint Andrew — in Greek Andreas, "the manly one", "the courageous" — is one of the Twelve Apostles and the brother of Simon Peter. A fisherman from Bethsaida on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, he was, according to the Fourth Gospel, the very first to follow Jesus: Greek tradition has hailed him since antiquity with the title of "Protoclete", the "First Called".[1]
His vocation bears a unique spiritual signature: no sooner had he recognised the Messiah than he ran to fetch his brother. "We have found the Messiah," he told him as he brought him to Jesus — and that brother would become Peter, the rock of the Church.[2] Andrew thus appears, from the very first page, as the apostle who brings others to Christ: he brings Peter, he points out the boy with the five loaves, he introduces the Greeks who wish to see Jesus.[3]
After Pentecost, an ancient tradition, already known to Origen and Eusebius of Caesarea, sends Andrew to evangelise Scythia, north of the Black Sea, then Asia Minor, Thrace and Greece.[4] He is said to have founded the Church of Byzantium, the future Constantinople, by establishing Saint Stachys as its first bishop: it is from him that the Ecumenical Patriarchate still claims descent today, as Rome claims descent from Peter.[5]
Andrew died crucified at Patras, in Achaia, around 60. Medieval tradition would give him the X-shaped cross, the crux decussata that became "Saint Andrew's Cross", on which he is said to have been bound rather than nailed, to prolong the agony and to preach longer.[6] Venerated from Russia to Scotland, which have made him their patron, he remains one of the most universal apostles — and, because he is Peter's brother, a living sign of the unity desired between the Christian East and West.[7]
Who is Saint Andrew the Apostle?
Andrew of Bethsaida: fisherman of Galilee, brother of Simon Peter
Andrew was born in the early 1st century at Bethsaida in Galilee, a small fishing town on the northern shore of Lake Tiberias. He was the son of Jonah (or John) and the brother of Simon, the future Peter; both worked as fishermen and, at the beginning of Jesus' public life, shared the same house at Capernaum.[8] His name is purely Greek — Andreas, derived from anēr, "man" in the sense of courage — a sign that the Galilee of Jesus' time, nicknamed "Galilee of the Gentiles", was deeply open to the Hellenistic world.[9]
This detail is not incidental. Andrew's Greek name, like his later role as intermediary for the Greeks who came to see Jesus, places him at the frontier of two worlds: Galilean Judaism and the Greco-Roman world where the Gospel would soon spread. Andrew belongs to that first generation of apostles who spoke Aramaic yet whose culture already enabled them to proclaim Christ to the Gentiles.
The "First Called" (Protoclete)
The title that sums up the whole figure of Saint Andrew comes from the Byzantine liturgy: he is the Protoclete (Πρωτόκλητος), the "First Called".[10] According to the Gospel of John, Andrew was first a disciple of John the Baptist; hearing him point to Jesus as "the Lamb of God", he followed him at once and was thus the first of the Twelve to attach himself to Christ.[11]
"Behold, the Lamb of God." — Saint John the Baptist, pointing out Jesus to his disciples, Gospel according to Saint John 1:36[12]
The Eastern Church has drawn a whole theology from this chronological primacy: if Peter is first by authority, Andrew is first by calling. Far from opposing each other, the two brothers thus frame the entire apostolic college — one at the principle of mission, the other at the principle of unity.
Andrew in the Gospels: a discreet but decisive presence
Andrew is not a leading figure in the Gospel narrative: he is not part, like Peter, James and John, of the circle of three witnesses of the Transfiguration and the Agony. Yet he is always named among the first four in the lists of the Twelve, and the New Testament reserves for him several decisive scenes.[13] Each time, his role is the same: he makes the connection, he brings someone to Jesus.
This active discretion is his signature. Andrew never occupies centre stage; he introduces, he presents, he points out. That is why spiritual tradition has seen in him the patron of all who, without fanfare, bring others to Christ — the first missionary, in the etymological sense of one who is sent to his neighbour.
The vocation: from the Baptist to Christ
Disciple of John the Baptist: the search for the Messiah
Before following Jesus, Andrew was in the desert, among the disciples of John the Baptist.[14] This detail, peculiar to the Fourth Gospel, reveals a man in search, not content with received religion but actively awaiting the coming of the Messiah. When the Baptist, seeing Jesus pass by, utters the words "Behold, the Lamb of God", Andrew and another disciple — whom tradition identifies as John the Evangelist — leave their first master to follow the new one.[15]
Jesus turns round and puts to them the first question of his Johannine ministry: "What do you seek?" They answer: "Rabbi, where are you staying?" — and Jesus invites them: "Come and see." They spent that day with him, the Gospel notes: "it was about the tenth hour."[16] Andrew kept the precise memory of that hour: the hour of his founding encounter.
"We have found the Messiah": Andrew brings Peter
Andrew's first act, once he has met Jesus, is to run and fetch his brother. It is the founding act of all evangelisation, and the Gospel has fixed its words:
"He first found his brother Simon and said to him: 'We have found the Messiah' — which means Christ. And he brought him to Jesus." — Gospel according to Saint John 1:41-42[17]
By bringing Simon, Andrew brings to the Church the one who will become its rock. The Fathers stressed the paradox: the first called introduces the one who will be first in dignity. Andrew is not diminished by this; on the contrary, he fulfils his own vocation, which is to lead to Jesus, not to keep for himself. Andrew's holiness lies entirely in this fruitful self-effacement.
The call on the shore: "fishers of men"
To John's account is added the scene, told by Matthew and Mark, of the call on the lakeshore of the Sea of Galilee. Jesus sees the two brothers casting their net and calls them together:
"Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men. And immediately they left their nets and followed him." — Gospel according to Saint Mark 1:17-18[18]
Far from contradicting each other, the two accounts complement one another: the encounter at the Jordan (John) precedes the definitive call by the lake (the Synoptics), where Andrew and Peter leave everything to follow the Master. The promise to become "fishers of men" sums up the mission Andrew will fulfil until martyrdom: to catch men in the net of the Gospel.
Andrew in Jesus' ministry
The five loaves and the two fish
At the multiplication of the loaves, it is again Andrew who provides the link between the hungry crowd and the coming miracle. Faced with five thousand men to feed, he spots a detail all the others overlook:
"Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, said to him: 'There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish; but what are they for so many?' " — Gospel according to Saint John 6:8-9[19]
Andrew brings what little he has found, confessing his own insufficiency — "what are they?" — and it is precisely that little, placed in Christ's hands, that will feed the multitude. In spiritual tradition the scene has become the image of the poor gift offered to God: Andrew does not work the miracle, but he supplies its matter by presenting to Christ what is small.
"We wish to see Jesus": the Greeks and Andrew
A few days before the Passion, Greeks who have come up to Jerusalem for the feast approach the apostle Philip: "We wish to see Jesus." Philip does not decide alone: he refers to Andrew, and both together pass the request on to the Master.[20]
"Philip went and told Andrew; Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus." — Gospel according to Saint John 12:22[21]
That Greeks should approach the apostle with the Greek name is doubtless no coincidence, and tradition has seen in it a prefiguring of Andrew's mission to the Hellenistic world. Above all, the episode confirms his vocation as introducer: he is the one through whom the nations come to Christ. Jesus' answer — "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies..." — already announces the Cross that will be the end of Andrew's own journey.[22]
On the Mount of Olives: the question of the last things
Finally, on the Mount of Olives, facing the Temple, Andrew is among the four intimates who question Jesus about the end times. Mark names him expressly, alongside Peter, James and John:
"And as he sat on the Mount of Olives opposite the Temple, Peter and James and John and Andrew asked him privately." — Gospel according to Saint Mark 13:3[23]
This is the only time Andrew is associated with the circle of the three privileged witnesses. His question opens Jesus' great eschatological discourse on the destruction of the Temple and the coming of the Son of Man. Andrew, the first called, is thus present at both ends of the Gospel: at the dawn of vocation and on the threshold of the Passion.
The apostle's mission after Pentecost
Missionary traditions: Scythia, Asia Minor, Greece
After Pentecost, the New Testament falls silent about Andrew. But an ancient tradition, earlier than the 3rd century, attributes to him the evangelisation of the regions north and east of the Aegean Sea. Eusebius of Caesarea, quoting Origen, writes that Andrew received as his lot Scythia — the vast territory north of the Black Sea, covering what are today parts of Romania, Ukraine, Russia and Georgia.[24]
"Andrew received Scythia as his lot." — Origen, quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History, III, 1[25]
Other traditions, collected by the Fathers and the Greek menologia, have him preach in Cappadocia, Bithynia, Pontus, Thrace, Macedonia and finally Achaia, in southern Greece, where he would suffer martyrdom.[26] These itineraries, transmitted by late and sometimes divergent sources, do not have the solidity of the Gospel accounts; but their convergence on a great axis — from the Scythian world to Greece — preserves the memory of a real mission towards the north-east of the Mediterranean basin.
Andrew and the foundation of the see of Byzantium
Among these traditions, the most consequential is the one that makes Andrew the founder of the Church of Byzantium. According to Byzantine sources, the apostle is said to have preached in the city on the Bosphorus and to have established his disciple Stachys — the man whom Saint Paul greets in the Epistle to the Romans — as its first bishop.[27] When Byzantium became Constantinople, the "new Rome", and then the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, this apostolic origin took on capital importance.
Just as Rome claims Peter, Constantinople claims Andrew. The Patriarch of Constantinople is still called today the "successor of the First-Called". The flesh-and-blood brotherhood of the two apostles — Peter and Andrew — has thus become, over the centuries, the symbol of the brotherhood desired between the two great Churches of East and West.[28]
The Acts of Andrew and apostolic memory
The main source of these traditions is an apocryphal writing from the mid-2nd century, the Acts of Andrew (Acta Andreae), known to Eusebius, Epiphanius of Salamis and several Fathers.[29] Like the other apocryphal Acts, this text mingles a core of ancient memory with legendary developments and suspect doctrinal tendencies (encratism), which explains its exclusion from the canon.[30]
The Church therefore does not receive the Acts of Andrew as a historical source in the full sense; but it recognises in it the witness of a very early veneration of the apostle and the memory, transmitted in amplified form, of his martyrdom at Patras. It is from this stock, reworked notably by Gregory of Tours in the 6th century in his Book of the Miracles of Saint Andrew, that the liturgical figure of the saint was formed.[31]
The martyrdom at Patras
Before the proconsul Aegeates
Unanimous tradition places Andrew's death at Patras (Patrae), the great port of Achaia on the north-west coast of the Peloponnese. According to the Passion of Saint Andrew, the apostle there converted Maximilla, the wife of the Roman proconsul Aegeates (Aegeas or Aegeates), as well as many inhabitants — which provoked the magistrate's fury.[32] Ordered to sacrifice to idols, Andrew refused and confessed Christ crucified; Aegeates then condemned him to the cross.[33]
The Roman Martyrology for 30 November, and the Passion that is its source, report that Andrew was bound and not nailed to the cross, so that his torment would be prolonged and his agony become a final preaching. Tradition holds that he preached for two whole days from his cross, exhorting the assembled crowd to faith.[34]
The X-shaped cross: birth of a tradition
The famous X-shaped cross, the crux decussata now called "Saint Andrew's Cross", does not appear in the earliest accounts. The first sources, including Gregory of Tours, describe Andrew fastened to an ordinary cross, like that of Christ.[35] The iconography of the X-shaped cross was only standardised at the end of the Middle Ages, and really imposed itself only in the 15th-17th centuries.[36]
Later tradition explains this choice by the apostle's humility: Andrew is said to have judged himself unworthy to die on a cross of the same shape as his Master's, and to have asked for a different cross.[37] Without assured historical value, this motif possesses great spiritual truth: it expresses the refusal to equal Christ and the love of the Cross pressed to the point of desiring to share it in abasement. This X-shaped cross would become, under the name of saltire, one of the most widespread emblems of Christendom, from the Scottish flag to the ensign of the Russian navy.
"O good Cross!": the greeting to the cross
The climax of the Passion of Saint Andrew is the greeting the apostle addresses to his cross when he sees it. This text, taken up by the Martyrology and by the liturgy of the feast, is one of the most beautiful Christian hymns to the Cross:
"Hail, O Cross, made holy by Christ's body and adorned with his precious limbs as with jewels! Long have I desired you, ardently have I loved you, unceasingly have I sought you; and now at last you are made ready for my soul's desire. Receive me from among men and restore me to my Master, so that through you he may receive me who through you redeemed me." — Passion of Saint Andrew, greeting to the cross[38]
Historical criticism regards this Passion as a late and largely legendary text; the greeting can therefore not be quoted as an authentic utterance recorded from the apostle's lips.[39] But it faithfully expresses the martyrial spirituality of the early Church, which saw in the cross not an instrument of horror but the throne of glory of the disciple united to his Lord. Andrew, the first called, thus becomes the cantor of the Cross.
The spirituality of Saint Andrew
The apostle who brings others to Christ
Andrew's great lesson can be summed up in one verb: to bring. He brings Peter, he brings the boy with the five loaves, he brings the Greeks. His holiness is not that of brilliant speech but that of the link: he always stands between someone and Jesus, and steps aside as soon as the meeting has taken place. This is the very definition of the apostle, sent not for himself but to lead to another.
"Whoever comes to me I will never cast out." — Jesus, Gospel according to Saint John 6:37[40]
The Fathers cherished this figure because it is imitable by all: not everyone is called to preach before crowds, but everyone can, like Andrew, say to a brother "we have found the Messiah" and bring him to Christ. Andrew is the quiet patron of all grassroots evangelisation, the kind that begins within one's own family.
Love of the Cross
The second mark of Andrew's spirituality is love of the Cross. The whole tradition of his martyrdom — the cross requested out of humility, the preaching continued from the gibbet, the greeting to the cross — makes him the par excellence witness of Christian joy in suffering. He does not endure the cross, he desires it, because it unites him definitively to the One who redeemed him through it.
This spirituality exactly prolongs the promise of the call: to become a "fisher of men" to the end means letting oneself be caught in the net of the Cross. Andrew's death thus appears as the last page, lived and not written, of the Gospel he had received on the lakeshore.
The fruitful discretion of the second place
Brother of Peter, Andrew spent his whole life beside a man called to precede him in authority. Far from feeling jealousy, he made this second place the very locus of his fruitfulness: it is he who brings Peter, that is, who gives the Church its head. Eastern tradition magnified this paradox by calling him Protoclete, the first called, as if to do justice to the one who freely accepted not being first in rank.
Andrew thus teaches a rare virtue: the joy of serving one greater than oneself. Where ambition divides, his brotherhood with Peter becomes fruitful — and that is why posterity has seen in the two brothers, and not in one alone, the double apostolic foundation of the Church of East and West.
The veneration of Saint Andrew
The relics: from Patras to Constantinople, Amalfi and Rome
The fate of Saint Andrew's relics alone tells a thousand years of Christian history. Buried at Patras, the apostle's body was transferred to Constantinople in 357, on the orders of Emperor Constantius II, and laid in the prestigious Church of the Holy Apostles, alongside the remains of Saint Luke and Saint Timothy.[41]
During the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade, the relics were carried to the West: in 1208, Cardinal Peter of Capua, a native of Amalfi, had them transferred to Amalfi Cathedral, where the apostle's body still rests today.[42] The skull, which had remained in the East, was given in 1462 to Pope Pius II by the Byzantine despot Thomas Palaiologos, brother of the last emperor, who was fleeing the Ottoman advance; it was then venerated at Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome.[43]
The return of the skull to Patras (1964): Paul VI's gesture
In the 20th century, the fate of the relics took on an ecumenical dimension. As a sign of friendship towards the Orthodox Church of Greece, Pope Paul VI decided to restore the skull of Saint Andrew to Patras. On 24 September 1964, Cardinal Augustin Bea, accompanied by a delegation, solemnly handed the precious relic to the Metropolitan of Patras, in the basilica built in honour of the apostle.[44] In 1980, Cardinal Roger Etchegaray added the restitution of a fragment of the saint's cross.[45]
This gesture belonged to the great movement of rapprochement between Rome and Orthodoxy undertaken by Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras, who together, in 1965, lifted the excommunications of 1054. To return Andrew's skull to Greece was to recognise the apostolic dignity of the East — and to make the First-Called, brother of Peter, an artisan of reconciliation.
Patronages: Scotland, Russia, Romania, Greece, Ukraine
Saint Andrew is one of the most universally honoured saints. He is the patron of Scotland — whose flag, the white saltire on a blue field, reproduces his X-shaped cross. Tradition links this patronage to the legend of Saint Regulus, who is said to have brought relics of the apostle to the Pictish coast, to the place that became the city of Saint Andrews.[46]
He is also the patron of Russia — the Order of Saint Andrew, founded by Peter the Great, is the highest distinction of the Empire, and the ensign of the Russian navy bears his blue cross — as well as of Ukraine, Romania, Georgia and Greece, whose Churches claim him as their apostolic founder.[47] Patron of fishermen and fishmongers, he is invoked worldwide on his feast day.
Andrew and Peter: the two brothers, sign of the Church's unity
The highest meaning of the veneration of Saint Andrew is doubtless ecumenical. Because he is the brother of Peter, and because Constantinople claims him as Rome claims Peter, Andrew has become the living symbol of the desired unity between East and West. Each year, for Saint Andrew's feast on 30 November, the Pope sends a delegation to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople; and for the feast of Saints Peter and Paul on 29 June, the Patriarch sends a delegation to Rome.[48]
This double exchange, instituted after the Second Vatican Council, stages the brotherhood of the two apostles as a programme of reconciliation: what united Peter and Andrew according to the flesh must reunite their Churches according to the Spirit. Andrew, the first called, thus remains the apostle of hope for unity.
Liturgical feast and iconography
The Latin Church and the Eastern Churches celebrate Saint Andrew on 30 November, the traditional date of his martyrdom.[49] In the Roman liturgical calendar, his feast almost always opens the season of Advent, of which he is the nearest saint: Andrew, the first called, thus introduces the liturgical year as he once introduced the first disciples to Christ.
Iconography portrays him as an old man with a thick white beard, holding or embracing his X-shaped cross, sometimes with a net or fish recalling his trade. From the basilica of Patras to the cathedrals of Amalfi and Saint Andrews, his image everywhere recalls the same lesson: that of a man who left everything to follow, and gave everything to bring others to the One he had been the first to recognise as the Messiah.
To go further
- Saint Peter — the prince of the apostles, Andrew's brother, whom he was the first to bring to Christ.
- Saint Paul — the Apostle to the Gentiles, who greets Stachys, the first bishop appointed by Andrew at Byzantium.
- Saint John the Baptist — the forerunner whose disciple Andrew was, before following the Lamb of God.
- Saint Luke the Evangelist — whose relics rested at Constantinople alongside Andrew's.
- Saint Mark the Evangelist — another apostle-founder of a great Eastern see, that of Alexandria.
- Saint Stephen — the protomartyr, the first witness of blood shed for Christ.
Notes and References
Joseph MacRory, "St. Andrew", The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. I, Robert Appleton Company, New York, 1907 (full text on New Advent: https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01471a.htm). Reference entry on Andrew's origin at Bethsaida, his link with Peter, his vocation as a disciple of the Baptist, his title of Protoclete, his Gospel appearances, missionary traditions (Scythia, Achaia, Byzantium and Stachys), martyrdom at Patras under the proconsul Aegeates, the decussata cross, and the feast of 30 November.
1 8 9 10 13 26 33 49Gospel according to Saint John 1:35-42: John the Baptist points to "the Lamb of God"; Andrew and another disciple follow Jesus ("What do you seek? — Rabbi, where are you staying? — Come and see", about the tenth hour); Andrew finds his brother Simon: "We have found the Messiah", and brings him to Jesus. Translation: Jerusalem Bible, Éditions du Cerf, Paris.
2 11 12 14 15 16 17Gospel according to Saint John 6:8-9 (and 6:37): at the multiplication of the loaves, Andrew points out "a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish." Translation: Jerusalem Bible, Cerf.
3 19 40Origen, quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History, Book III, ch. 1 (c. 325): distribution of the apostles' mission fields, "Andrew received Scythia as his lot" (region north of the Black Sea). Reference edition: coll. Sources Chrétiennes no. 31, transl. Gustave Bardy, Éditions du Cerf, Paris, 1952.
4 24 25Tradition of the foundation of the see of Byzantium by Saint Andrew and the institution of Saint Stachys (cf. Romans 16:9) as first bishop: late Byzantine sources (menologia; Nicetas the Paphlagonian, 10th century) summarised in MacRory, Catholic Encyclopedia, "St. Andrew". On the patronage of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and the annual exchange of delegations between Rome (feast of Saints Peter and Paul, 29 June) and the Phanar (feast of Saint Andrew, 30 November), see the statements of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.
5 27 28 48On the X-shaped cross (crux decussata, "saltire" or "Saint Andrew's Cross"): early sources (Gregory of Tours) describe an ordinary cross; the iconography of the X-shaped cross was only standardised at the end of the Middle Ages and really imposed itself in the 15th-17th centuries. Tradition explains it by the apostle's humility, deeming himself unworthy to die as Christ did. See "Andrew the Apostle", Wikipedia, Cross of Saint Andrew section, and "Saltire".
6 36 37Return of the skull of Saint Andrew to Patras by Pope Paul VI: on 24 September 1964, Cardinal Augustin Bea handed the relic to the Metropolitan of Patras, as part of the rapprochement with the Greek Orthodox Church. In 1980, Cardinal Roger Etchegaray restored a fragment of the apostle's cross. See the New York Times, 26 September 1964, and John Sanidopoulos, "The Return of the Skull of the Apostle Andrew to Patras in 1964".
7 44 45Gospel according to Saint Mark 1:16-18 (parallel Matthew 4:18-20): the calling of Andrew and Simon by the Sea of Galilee, "Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men." Translation: Jerusalem Bible, Cerf.
18Gospel according to Saint John 12:20-22: Greeks who have come up for the feast ask to see Jesus; Philip tells Andrew, and Andrew and Philip tell Jesus. Followed by the saying of the grain of wheat (Jn 12:24). Translation: Jerusalem Bible, Cerf.
20 21 22Gospel according to Saint Mark 13:3-4: on the Mount of Olives, "Peter, James, John and Andrew" question Jesus privately about the destruction of the Temple and the end times, opening the eschatological discourse. Translation: Jerusalem Bible, Cerf.
23Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History, III, 25 (on the apocryphal writings attributed to the apostles); Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion, against the encratite use of the Acts of Andrew. The Acts of Andrew (Acta Andreae) date from the mid-2nd century; a legendary text mixed with encratite tendencies, not received into the canon. See Jean-Marc Prieur, Acta Andreae, coll. Corpus Christianorum, Series Apocryphorum, Brepols, Turnhout, 1989.
29 30Gregory of Tours, Book of the Miracles of Saint Andrew the Apostle (Liber de miraculis beati Andreae apostoli, c. 590), Latin abridgement of an early version of the Acts of Andrew: Andrew is described as bound to an ordinary cross, preaching from the gibbet. Edition in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum, vol. I, 2.
31 35Passion of Saint Andrew (Passio sancti Andreae apostoli / Epistola presbyterorum et diaconorum Achaiae), late and largely legendary text preserved in Greek and Latin: account of the martyrdom at Patras under the proconsul Aegeates, conversion of Maximilla, two days' preaching from the cross, and greeting to the cross ("Salve, crux..."). Original Latin text of the greeting: "Salve, crux pretiosa, suscipe discipulum eius qui pependit in te magister meus Christus." Taken up on 30 November by the Roman Martyrology. Criticism regards this text as non-historical; it testifies to early martyrial spirituality, not to an authentically recorded saying.
32 34 38 39Transfer of Saint Andrew's body from Patras to Constantinople in 357, on the orders of Emperor Constantius II, and deposition in the Church of the Holy Apostles alongside the relics of Saint Luke and Saint Timothy. See MacRory, Catholic Encyclopedia, "St. Andrew", and "Church of the Holy Apostles".
41After the sack of Constantinople (1204) by the Fourth Crusade, Cardinal Peter of Capua (Pietro Capuano), a native of Amalfi, had Saint Andrew's relics transferred to Amalfi Cathedral in 1208, where the apostle's body rests. See the entry for Amalfi Cathedral (Duomo di Sant'Andrea) and Aleteia, "Amalfi, Italy: Relics of St. Andrew", 2021.
42The skull of Saint Andrew was handed in 1462 to Pope Pius II by the despot Thomas Palaiologos, brother of the last Byzantine emperor, fleeing the Ottoman advance; it was venerated at Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome. See MacRory, Catholic Encyclopedia, "St. Andrew", and "Andrew the Apostle", Wikipedia.
43Patronages of Saint Andrew: Scotland (flag of the saltire, legend of Saint Regulus bringing the relics to the place that became Saint Andrews), Russia (Order of Saint Andrew of Peter the Great, ensign of the navy), Ukraine, Romania, Georgia, Greece (Patras), Barbados; patron of fishermen. See "Andrew the Apostle", Wikipedia, Patronage section, and Britannica, "Saint Andrew".
46 47