1. Saint Vitus has for long been tied to the Sicilian martyrs Modestus and Crescentia but in the earliest sources it is clear that these were originally different traditions that later became combined.
12 Facts About Saint Vitus
1. 2.
Saint Vitus is said to protect against lightning strikes, animal attacks and oversleeping.
3.
Saint Vitus resisted his father's attempts, which included various forms of torture, to make him turn away from his faith.
4.
Saint Vitus fled with his tutor Modestus and Modestus's wife Crescentia, who was Vitus's nanny, to Lucania.
5.
Saint Vitus was taken from there to Rome to drive out a demon which had taken possession of a son of the Emperor Diocletian.
6.
Saint Vitus successfully performed the exorcism, but, because he stayed faithful to Christianity, he and his tutors were tortured.
7.
Three days later, Saint Vitus appeared to a distinguished matron named Florentia, who then found the bodies and buried them where they lay.
8.
From Corvey the veneration of St Saint Vitus spread throughout Westphalia and in the districts of eastern and northern Germany.
9.
Saint Vitus's popularity grew in Prague, Bohemia when, in AD 925, king Henry I of Germany presented as a gift the bones of one hand of St Vitus to Wenceslaus, Duke of Bohemia.
10.
Saint Vitus is one of the Fourteen Martyrs who give aid in times of trouble.
11.
Saint Vitus is specifically invoked against chorea, which is called St Vitus Dance.
12.
Saint Vitus is represented as a young man with a palm-leaf, in a cauldron, sometimes with a raven and a lion, his iconographic attribute because according to the legend he was thrown into a cauldron of boiling tar and molten lead, but miraculously escaped unscathed.