Saint Saint Veronica

Saint Veronica, also known as Berenike, was a widow from Jerusalem who lived in the 1st century AD, according to extra-biblical Christian traditions. Apocryphal texts relate how Veronica was moved with sympathy seeing Jesus carrying the cross to Calvary and gave him her veil so that he could wipe his forehead. Jesus accepted the offer, and when he returned the veil the image of his face was miraculously captured on it. The resulting relic became known as the Veil of Veronica. The story of Veronica is celebrated in the sixth Station of the Cross in Anglican, Catholic, and Western Orthodox churches. A celebrated saint in many pious Christian countries, the 17th-century Acta Sanctorum published by the Bollandists listed her feast under July 12, but the German Jesuit scholar Joseph Braun cited her commemoration in Festi Marianni on January 13. There is no reference to the story of Veronica and her veil in the canonical gospels. The closest is the miracle of the unnamed woman who was healed by touching the hem of Jesus’s garment. The apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus gives her name as Berenikē or Beronike (Koine Greek: Βερενίκη). The name Veronica is a Latinisation of this ancient Macedonian name. The story was later elaborated in the 11th century by adding that Christ gave her a portrait of himself on a cloth, with which she later cured the Emperor Tiberius. The linking of this with the bearing of the cross in the Passion occurs only around 1380 in the internationally popular book Meditations on the Life of Christ. At some point a relic became associated with the story. Pedro Tafur, a Spanish knight visiting Rome in 1436, describes the following in the Church of St. Peter in his 1454 travel account: However, he does not say specifically that he witnessed for himself this exhibition of the relic. Some academic sources suggest a different origin for the legend of St.