Yes, there was a real Santa Claus

St. Nicholas of Myra (aka Santa Claus)

"Yes, Virginia, there was a Santa Claus." This is a "virtual clay" reconstruction of the face of St. Nicholas (A.D. 270-346), bishop of Myra, known today as "Santa Claus". He lived and died in the fourth century in what is now Turkey.

In early Christian times, Myra was the metropolis of Lycia in the Roman empire. St. Paul changed ships in its harbor. [Must have been the Atlanta of its day. Ed.] Today Myra boasts the ruins of an ancient Greek theatre and rock-cut tombs of the ancient Lycian necropolis.

So holy was St. Nicholas regarded after his death that his relics were carefully preserved and eventually moved to the Roman city of Barium, the capital city of Apulia, on the Adriatic coast of Italy. In the 1950s, the Saint's relics, including his skull, were removed while his crypt was being renovated. While the relics were temporarily out of the crypt, the Vatican asked an anatomy professor at the University of Bari to take thousands of minutely-detailed measurements and x-rays.

More recently, an expert facial anthropologist was commissioned to reconstruct the Saint's face and head using the new technology and the earlier measurements.

Why was Nicholas declared a saint? The most famous story to come down to us is that Nicholas, who was born into a wealthy family, heard of the plight of a father who could not afford dowries for his three daughters, and secretly left bags of gold coins at their home to provide the dowries and preserve the ladies from a likely fate as prostitutes. The father lay in wait the third time the donor was to visit and thus discovered the identity of the Saint.

But St. Nicholas was a true Christian. He understood that "charity" was not essentially handing out money, but love for Christ, shown particularly in preserving right doctrine (orthodoxy) against heresy (heterodoxy). Thus, St. Nicholas was an outspoken opponent of Arianism, the heresy that infected the popes and bishops of the Church of the fourth century. Arianism denies the divinity of Christ, and sadly persists in today's mainstream Roman Catholic Church.

In the end, the pugnacious St. Nicholas -- you can see that his nose was broken, possibly in a fistfight at a church council! -- and the other orthodox bishops carried the day against the heretical popes and bishops. The Council of Nicaea, the greatest council of the Church, vanquished the Arian heretics and confirmed the Biblical teaching that Christ was both true God and true man. May God grant us such a saint in our day to combat the heresies of the modern Church and re-establish traditional Catholicism.