Veneration
His relics were translated from the Battistero di Napoli to the district known as Rione Sanità in the 9th century, to what became known as the Catacombs of San Severo. In 1310, Archbishop Umberto d’Ormont (Uberto d'Ormont), who had served as abbot of the Basilica of San Severo, placed Severus' relics in the main altar of San Severo, and had built a marble ciborium, which has been attributed to Tino da Camaino.
The Marble Calendar of Naples, sculpted in the ninth century and preserved in the Cathedral of Naples, lists Severus under the feast day of April 29 –the date that appears in the Roman Martyrology.
A legendary Vita, written in the eleventh century, states that Severus brought a dead man back to life after the man’s widow and children had been left destitute. The facts are these: a man of Naples one day went to a bathing establishment and forgot to take with him the usual fee for the proprietor: an egg. The man promised to pay the bath-keeper back. Unfortunately, he died a few days later and the bath-keeper then demanded from the widow a large amount of money that he pretended the deceased man had owed him. A judge ordered that the woman and her children be sold into slavery since she could not pay. The widow appealed to Saint Severus for assistance. Severus declared, “The dead man himself shall give evidence.” The town was gathered together at the man’s tomb and Severus asked the dead man to answer truthfully about how much he owed the bath-keeper. The corpse opened his eyes, and stood up, and said “I owe but one egg.” Then he fell back again. The crowd immediately attacked the bath-keeper, but Severus protected the man from further harm.
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Famous quotes containing the word veneration:
“Erasmus was the light of his century; others were its strength: he lighted the way; others knew how to walk on it while he himself remained in the shadow as the source of light always does. But he who points the way into a new era is no less worthy of veneration than he who is the first to enter it; those who work invisibly have also accomplished a feat.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“It is evident, from their method of propagation, that a couple of cats, in fifty years, would stock a whole kingdom; and if that religious veneration were still paid them, it would, in twenty more, not only be easier in Egypt to find a god than a man, which Petronius says was the case in some parts of Italy; but the gods must at last entirely starve the men, and leave themselves neither priests nor votaries remaining.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)