Holy Card of St. George 4.75" X 3.75" & a 1" Silver Oxidized Medal of St. George

Description

Laminated Holy Card of Saint George (4.75" X 3.75") Plus a 1" Silver Oxidized Medal of Saint George.
This medal features an image of St. George on one side and an image of The Sacred Heart of Jesus on the other. It is made in Italy, silver oxidized and is approximately 7/8" tall. Attached jump rings are included. The Sacred Heart of Jesus is a devotion to the actual physical heart of Jesus as a representation of his divine love for humanity. The devotion emphasizes the unmitigated love, compassion, and long suffering of the heart of Jesus for humanity.
Saint George ( died 23 April 303), also George of Lydda, was a Christian who is accepted as a saint in Christianity. According to traditional rumors, he was a soldier in the Roman army. His parents were Christians of Greek origin. His father, Gerontius, was a Cappadocian serving in the Roman army. His mother, Polychronia, was a Christian from the city of Lod in Palestine. Saint George was a soldier of Cappadocian Greek origins, member of the Praetorian Guard for Roman emperor Diocletian, who was sentenced to death for refusing to recant his Christian faith. He became one of the most venerated saints and megalomartyrs in Christianity, and he has been especially venerated as a military saint since the Crusades.
In hagiography, as one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers and one of the most prominent military saints, he is immortalized in the legend of Saint George and the Dragon. His memorial, Saint George's Day, is traditionally celebrated on 23 April. England, Ethiopia, Georgia, Catalonia and Aragon in Spain, Moscow in Russia, and several other nation states, cities, universities, professions and organizations claim George as their patron.
The bones of Saint George are buried in his tomb (sarcophagus) in the Church of Saint George, Lod, Israel.
Very little is known about George's life, but it is thought he was a Roman officer of Greek descent from Cappadocia who was martyred in one of the pre-Constantinian persecutions. Beyond this, early sources give conflicting information.
There are two main versions of the legend, a Greek and a Latin version, which can both be traced to the 5th or 6th century. The saint's veneration dates to the 5th century with some certainty, and possibly still to the 4th. The addition of the dragon legend dates to the 11th century.
The earliest text which preserves fragments of George's narrative is in a Greek hagiography which is identified by Hippolyte Delehaye of the scholarly Bollandists to be a palimpsest of the 5th century. An earlier work by Eusebius, Church history, written in the 4th century, contributed to the legend but did not name George or provide significant detail. The work of the Bollandists Daniel Papebroch, Jean Bolland, and Godfrey Henschen in the 17th century was one of the first pieces of scholarly research to establish the saint's historicity, via their publications in Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca. Pope Gelasius I stated in 494 that George was among those saints "whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose actions are known only to God."
The most complete version, based upon the fifth-century Greek text but in a later form, survives in a translation into Syriac from about 600. From text fragments preserved in the British Library a translation into English was published in 1925.
In the Greek tradition, George was born to Greek Christian parents, in Cappadocia. His father died for the faith when George was fourteen, and his mother returned with George to her homeland of Syria Palaestina. A few years later, George's mother died. George travelled to the eastern imperial capital, Nicomedia, where he joined the Roman army. George was persecuted by one Dadianus. In later versions of the Greek legend, this name is rationalized to Diocletian, and George's martyrdom is placed in the Diocletian persecution of AD 303. The setting in Nicomedia is also secondary, and inconsistent with the earliest cultus of the saint being located in Diospolis.
George was executed by decapitation before Nicomedia's city wall, on 23 April 303. A witness of his suffering convinced Empress Alexandra of Rome to become a Christian as well, so she joined George in martyrdom. His body was returned to Lydda for burial, where Christians soon came to honor him as a martyr.
The legend of Saint George and the Dragon was first recorded in the 11th century, in a Georgian source. It reached Catholic Europe in the 12th century. In the Golden Legend, by 13th-century Archbishop of Genoa Jacobus da Varagine, George's death was at the hands of Dacian, and about the year 287.
The tradition tells that a fierce dragon was causing panic at the city of Silene, Libya, at the time George arrived there. In order to prevent the dragon from devastating people from the city, they gave two sheep each day to the dragon, but when the sheep were not enough they were forced to sacrifice humans instead of the two sheep. The human to be sacrificed was elected by the city's own people and one time the king's daughter was chosen to be sacrificed but no one was willing to take her place. George saved the girl by slaying the dragon with a lance. The king was so grateful that he offered him treasures as a reward for saving his daughter's life, but George refused it and instead he gave these to the poor. The people of the city were so amazed at what they had witnessed that they became Christians and were all baptized.
The Golden Legend offered a historicized narration of George's encounter with a dragon. This account was very influential and it remains the most familiar version in English owing to William Caxton's 15th-century translation.
In the mediaeval romances, the lance with which George slew the dragon was called Ascalon, after the Levantine city of Ashkelon, today in Israel. The name Ascalon was used by Winston Churchill for his personal aircraft during World War II, according to records at Bletchley Park. In Sweden, the princess rescued by George is held to represent the kingdom of Sweden, while the dragon represents an invading army. Several sculptures of George battling the dragon can be found in Stockholm, the earliest inside Storkyrkan ("The Great Church") in the Old Town. Iconography of the horseman with spear overcoming evil was widespread throughout the Christian period.