St. Expeditus

Who they were

Expeditus needs the same disclaimer as Christopher, and a stronger one. The historical evidence for him is very thin, and there is a widely repeated story that his cult began from a misunderstanding: that a crate of relics sent from Rome was marked with a word meaning dispatched or expedited, and that the recipients took it for the martyr's name.

That origin story is itself probably a later invention, and historians treat it with the same scepticism they apply to the saint. What is documented is that a martyr named Expeditus appears in early martyrologies associated with Melitene in Armenia, and that devotion to him grew substantially in Europe and then in Latin America, particularly Brazil, and in New Orleans.

The iconography is the memorable part. He is shown as a Roman soldier holding a cross marked with the Latin for today, his foot on a crow whose cry is rendered as cras, the Latin for tomorrow. The image is a picture of a decision: today rather than tomorrow.

His devotion is popular rather than official in much of the world, and it is honest to describe it that way.

Where the devotion is strongest tells you something about it. In Brazil, Sao Expedito is among the most invoked saints in the country. In New Orleans he has a long-established shrine. In Reunion and parts of the Caribbean and Latin America the devotion is substantial and often intertwined with local popular religion.

His is a useful case for thinking about how patronage actually works. There is very little history here, the Church has never promoted the cult, and the image itself may be older than any story attached to it. What there is, is a picture that says something true and immediately legible about human behaviour, and several centuries of people finding it useful. The Church has generally let such devotions continue while declining to make claims for them, and that is roughly the right posture for a reader to take as well.

Why people turn to St. Expeditus

The patronage is entirely in the picture. A man treading on the voice that says tomorrow, holding a cross that says today, became the saint of urgent causes and of the particular human problem of knowing what to do and not doing it. People invoke him when something cannot wait, and when the obstacle is their own delay rather than the difficulty of the task.

How to ask their intercession

Name the thing that cannot wait, or the thing you have been avoiding, and be specific about which of the two it is. Given the state of the historical record, this is a devotion best held with an open hand: the asking is real, the biography largely is not, and the tradition is old enough to be worth keeping anyway.