The Feast of Saint James

Today is the Feast of Saint James the Greater, known throughout the Spanish-speaking world as Santiago and in French as Saint Jacques. He was one of Christ’s Twelve Apostles.

Saint James is the patron saint of the Archdiocese of Seattle. May you have the joy of the feast!

James and his brother John were natives of Galilee, sons of the fisherman Zebedee and his wife Salome, whom the Eastern Christians name Myrrh-bearer. They were disciples of John the Baptist, but the Baptist sent them to Jesus.

So fiery were these two brothers, Saints James and John, that Christ named them Boanerges – “Sons of Thunder” (Mark 3:17).

Along with Saint Peter, James and John made up a tight-knit group of Christ’s closest disciples. These three were with Him at many key moments in His ministry, including the Transfiguration (Matthew 17, Mark 9, Luke 9:28ff) and even to Gethsemane (Mark 14:33).

After the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ, Saint Luke tells us in the Acts of the Apostles how Herod Agrippa had James killed with the sword (Acts 12:2) in 44 BC.

So much for history. Now for legend.

Legend has it that prior to his martyrdom, James embarked on a missionary journey to Roman Hispania. It was not particularly successful, and the Medieval Golden Legend records that he only made nine disciples and ordained only four men.

In AD 40, in his despair and discouragement, he prayed for guidance on the banks of the Ebro River near the town of Caesaraugusta, modern-day Zaragoza. There, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to him. Bi-locating from Jerusalem, she offered him encouragement and consolation.

After this, James returned to Jerusalem. The fiery-tempered Apostle ran afoul of King Herod, and he met his death. And at this point, the story takes an even stranger turn.

From the Golden Legend:

When the blessed Saint James was beheaded, his disciples took the body away by night for fear of the Jews, and brought it into a ship, and committed unto the will of our Lord the sepulchre of it, and went withal into the ship without sail or rudder. And by the conduct of the angel of our Lord they arrived in Galicia. …

And then the disciples of Saint James took out his body and laid it upon a great stone. And anon the stone received the body into it as it had been soft wax, and made to the body a stone as it were a sepulchre.

The outside world rediscovered the site of the Saint’s tomb in the early ninth century, and the first pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela began shortly thereafter. Saint James became the patron of Christian Spain, and in his name the Islamic Moors were eventually driven out of the country.

Is the legend true? The Church has never taken a definitive stance, though the relics themselves were authenticated by Pope Leo XIII in 1884. It took a thousand years to confirm the identity of the bones in the tomb, and over that time and longer, many millions of pilgrims have come here to honour the memory and the sanctity of this man who was Christ’s Apostle.

Francine and I walked much of this pilgrimage twice, first in 2013 and then again in 2016. In 2018, we walked a (somewhat abbreviated) Camino of only about 100 miles (160 km) through Spanish Galicia.

In 2022, we walked a route known as the Camino Primitivo, which is the route of the first known pilgrim to Santiago (other than the apostle himself), King Alfonso II of Asturias.

In 2023, I walked a thousand miles from Le Puy-en-Velay to Santiago de Compostela on the Via Podiensis, while Francine served as an hospitalera in Logroño and then walked the Portuguese route.

This year, I walked the 1200-mile Via Lemovicensis from Vézelay in France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. This was a Camino that Francine wanted to walk, but she never got the chance.

I walked this Camino vicarie pro for Francine, meaning that all of the graces and indulgences attached to the pilgrimage are hers rather than mine. I flew to Paris on Easter Sunday, 2026, and I arrived in Santiago on the first anniversary of her death.

I’m now working on two books related to this adventure, with a possible third lurking in the background.

Almighty ever-living God,
who consecrated the first fruits of your Apostles
by the blood of Saint James,
grant, we pray,
that your Church may be strengthened
by his confession of faith
and constantly sustained by his protection.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever.

Amen.

Saint James, pray for us.