Dear Robert,
The Administrator is entirely correct!
Rome did not "unsaint" anyone, but it did remove some saints from its universal calendar and "downgraded" them to local observance.
As you know, the Byzantine Church has six grades of liturgical veneration of saints.
St George was downgraded to a local observance for those countries that honour him as their patron (ie. England and Georgia).
Others were given "optional memorials" and other quaint Latin liturgical things I don't pretend to fully understand.
This is not to say that "expunging of saints" hasn't been done before.
Rome reserved to itself the "rite" of expunging saints from the calendars of those Eastern Churches coming under, er, into communion with it
.
For example, the Ethiopian Catholic Church had its "St Pontius Pilate" expunged.
A few very anti-Latin Orthodox saints were expunged from the calendar of the Russian Church in 1904 - especially St Athanasius of Brest who had not a few not nice things to say about the Unia
.
St Mark of Ephesus is also noticeably absent from the calendar of the Greek Catholic Church - as are the 26 Zographou Martyrs of Athos . . .
The Russian Orthodox "unsainted" two saints for their being apparently implicated in the Old Believers controversy, including one local saint who was canonized by the then Metropolitan Nikon who started the very controversy! St Anna of Kashin was later "re-canonized."
The West established the Shrine to St Philumena and then had it dismantled when it was proven that the bones in the shrine were not only not those of a martyr - but were those of a man.
And politics and saints go very well together.
When John Hus was being widely venerated throughout Bohemia and the central European slavic lands, the RC Church established the cult to one St John Nepomucene Neumann - after whom the sainted Bishop of Philadelphia was named.
Protestant historians maintained that his cult was established by the Jesuits ONLY to counter that of Hus.
In 1963, the RC Church degraded St John's universal cult to a local one only.
There was doubt cast about whether he ever even existed.
It is practically impossible to totally wipe out a saint's cult.
In the fourth century there lived a saint named after the devil - Saint Lucifer of Cagliari.
He opposed St Hilary on the question of reception of Catholics who had lapsed during the persecution. He felt that such should never be taken back by the Church.
He was excommunicated and apparently died excommunicated on Sardinia - where his cult as a saint grew anyway, with churches and shrines to him.
The pope then declared him to be a local saint of Sardinia (Vallombrossa) only where it remains to this day.
In the Orthodox Church, local saints have greater flexibility to grown into national and international saints.
St Matrona of Moscow is a local saint of the Diocese of Moscow only, but she is so extremely popular that people want her icon and akafist from all over.
Anyway, I've said enough, don't you think?
Alex
