Saint Veronica of Jerusalem

Description

Saint Veronica was a woman of Jerusalem in the first century AD, according to Christian Sacred tradition. A celebrated saint in many pious Christian countries, the 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 13 January.The name “Veronica” itself is a Latinisation of Berenice (Greek: Βερενίκη, Berenikē, with a secondary form Beronike), a Macedonian name, meaning “bearer of victory”. The woman who offered her veil to Jesus was known by this name in the Byzantine East, but in the Latin West the name took a life of its own. As proven by a medieval text, “Veronica” was used by the 13th century as a designation for a relic venerated in Rome as the true image of Jesus. Since the Latin word for “true” or “authentic” happens to be vera, the theory emerged that the name itself is derived from the Latin phrase “true image”, vera icon (one Latin word for image is icon, derived from Greek: εικόνα, eikona). In the 13th-century text and also in some later sources the term Veronica was used for the veil, not the person, but for centuries it has been better known as the name of the woman. The claim that the name Veronica is derived from vera icon proved to be very persistent and we encounter it until today.