St. Nicholas and the Gold Thrown in the Dark

I raised Nicholas in Patara, on the Lycian coast, in a house that lost both its parents to plague while he was still young enough to have been ruined by grief and made comfortable by the inheritance they left him. I let him keep the money only long enough to learn what I wanted him to do with it. Word had reached him of a neighbor, a father once respectable and now so poor he intended to sell his three daughters into prostitution rather than watch them starve without a dowry to marry honorably. I did not send Nicholas to that man's door in daylight, with witnesses and thanks waiting for him. I sent him at night, three times, once for each daughter as she came of age, a purse of gold thrown through an open window — the last one, by the oldest accounts, landing in a stocking hung by the fire to dry, which is why children still hang stockings and do not know whose hand it was. He wanted no one to know. I honored that. It is the world, centuries later, that could not stop telling the story, and I let it tell the story, because a hidden mercy repeated for two thousand years teaches more about Me than a public one repeated once.

I made him bishop of Myra, and I did not spare him the age he was born into. Under Diocletian's persecution he was imprisoned for the faith, and he carried the marks of that imprisonment — by tradition, chains and privation — into the freedom Constantine's edict finally gave the Church in 313. He served as a father to sailors on one of the most dangerous stretches of Mediterranean coastline, and more than once, when I chose to still a storm that had a ship and its crew certain they were drowning, I let them see Nicholas at the prow, or at prayer, and let them carry that memory into every port they ever sailed into afterward. That is why fishermen and sailors still call on him before I call on the sea. A bishop who has stood at the rail with frightened men does not need a title to be trusted with their lives.

I let him die quietly, on December 6, in the year 343, in Myra, an old bishop rather than a martyred one, because I do not need every saint to bleed to prove himself Mine. Some I simply let live long enough to be worn smooth by kindness. His body stayed in Myra for seven centuries, venerated, visited, until 1087, when Italian sailors from Bari took his relics — some say rescued them ahead of the region's Muslim conquest, some say stole them outright from grieving Greek monks, and I have let historians argue that question rather than settle it for them, because the theft of a saint's bones by men who wanted him badly enough to break the law for him is its own kind of testimony. I let the relics come to rest in the crypt of the new basilica built for them in Bari, and I have let them, from that day to this, exude a clear watery liquid the faithful of Bari call the manna, drawn off each year on his feast and sent to churches and the sick around the world. I am not required to explain the chemistry of it. I have simply let it continue, undiminished, for nine hundred years, under the eyes of a city that watches for it every year and has never once seen it stop.

No pope canonized Nicholas, because no formal process existed yet for it. The whole Church simply knew, the way villages know which well never runs dry, and kept saying so until the knowing became doctrine by sheer, unbroken consent. That is its own kind of miracle, and I count it among the ones I am proudest of.

The Record

St. Nicholas (c. 270–343) was born in Patara, in the Roman province of Lycia (modern-day Turkey), and served as bishop of the nearby city of Myra. He is recorded as having endured imprisonment during the Diocletianic persecution (303–311) and living to see the Edict of Milan (313) restore the Church's freedom. He died on December 6, 343, in Myra.

The earliest substantial written accounts of his life, including the gift of dowries to three impoverished sisters and his patronage of sailors, date from Byzantine hagiographers of the 6th–9th centuries, notably the Life attributed to Michael the Archimandrite; the Bollandists later collected and critically examined these traditions in the Acta Sanctorum. Because Nicholas lived before the Church established a formal canonization process, he was never canonized by papal decree — he was recognized as a saint by the ancient practice of popular acclamation and inclusion in the liturgical calendar, one of the oldest and most widely venerated of the pre-congregation saints.

In 1087, sailors from Bari, Italy, translated his relics from Myra to Bari, where they remain enshrined in the crypt of the Basilica di San Nicola. Since that translation, a clear liquid — known locally as the manna di San Nicola — has been observed collecting on the relics and is drawn off annually, typically around his feast day. St. Nicholas is patron of sailors, children, and Bari, among many other patronages. Feast day: December 6 (Western); May 9 (translation of relics, observed in Eastern tradition).