Why do we have St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist as Patron Saints?
We are not Catholics!
Until about three hundred years ago, the rank and file of ordinary men had no clocks, watches or calendars. They did not think of the year as divided into twelve months, but into periods of another kind which varied in length and did not have numbers for the days. Instead, they thought of the year as a succession of periods, most of them of a religious character, such as Lent, and each day of the whole year had a name of it’s own. This is one of the reasons why the middle ages needed so many Saints. They had to have enough saints to give each of the three hundred and sixty fives days a name.
Each guild or fraternity in the Middle Ages were required by law to have a Patron Saint which meant that on Saint’s day the guild would take a holiday (holy day) and go in a body and in public procession to some chapel or altar dedicated to that Saint. The Freemasons of those early times had a number of different Patron Saints, depending on the place and period of time, but apparently they had St. Thomas Beckett more often than any other. No one knows why or when they finally settled on the days belonging to the two Sts. John, but when they did, it was for calendar reasons and not for theological reasons. The Baptist’s day is the longest day in the year in the sense of the number of hours of daylight and the Evangelist’s day was not only the shortest in that sense, but was the turning point of the year when the days began to become longer, and for that reason, everyone was happy to see it come.
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