Photo of painting (Segovia, Spain) of St. James by Sacred Destinations (flickr)

Today Catholics celebrate the feast of St. James the Greater, one of the twelve apostles, while Spanish Catholics celebrate his feast day under the name of their country’s patron saint, Santiago Matamoros (Saint Iago the Moor Slayer). He was called “greater” to distinguish him from the apostle James the Less, who was likely shorter or even slenderer. After the Ascension of Jesus, according to legend, St. James traveled to Spain to spread the Gospel, and after some success in converting the people there he returned to Jerusalem where he became the first apostle martyred, beheaded by Herod Agrippa in 44 AD for violating his prohibition against preaching the new Christian faith. The apostle’s followers transported his remains to Spain, where tradition has it that they found on the Galician coast a field illuminated by a star to indicate the apostle’s predestined resting place. The great cathedral housing the statue that made the news in 2004 is the Santiago de Compostela—St. Iago from the Field of the Star.

Nobody is a true pilgrim unless he is journeying towards the “house of St. James.”—Dante

My first thought when I learned of the Muslim outrage over the statue was to wonder what Mohammedans were doing in a church in the first place, but that’s the absurd world in which we live, a world not so unlike the time when Santiago was first rediscovered by Spain in the ninth century. For now as then, rediscovering the great saint comes when he is most sorely needed, when the furious enemy is not just outside the gates but is rather in our homelands and in our sanctuaries.

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This is another photo test of Windows Live Writer, celebrating one “small victory,” as a friend who put me on to it put it, for all of us and particularly for the good guys in Spain. It seems the statue of Spain’s patron saint is offensive to local Muslims, but it will nevertheless remain on display thanks to public outcry over a decision by Church bureaucrats, capitulating to the outraged Muslim minority, to remove it from its traditional place in the cathedral Santiago de Compostela.

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