Saint Blaise

Blaise trained and worked as a physician before being chosen bishop of Sebaste in Armenia, a position he held with a reputation for both holiness and healing. During a renewed wave of persecution under the Roman Empire, he withdrew to live as a hermit in a cave, where local tradition holds that wild animals would gather peacefully around him and that he tended to their injuries. Discovered by hunters and brought before the governor, Blaise was ordered to renounce his faith and, when he refused, was subjected to severe torture before being beheaded. A famous story attached to his life recounts that, on the way to his execution, he healed a young boy who was choking to death on a fishbone, and this account gave rise to the enduring custom, still practiced in many parishes today, of blessing the throats of the faithful on his feast day using two crossed candles.