​Written by  Fr. Dennis O'Neill

He was a shepherd before he became a bishop. During the persecution of Maximian, he was blinded and mutilated and sent into the mines. Eventually, he was released and ordained a bishop. He attended the Council of Nicaea in 325 and defended the Apostolic Faith against the Arians with earnestness and simplicity. He had the reputation of being a wonder-worker. At one time, when he was in dispute with one of the Arians, he picked up a tile (in some versions, it is a brick). He squeezed it, and a flame burst forth, while it dripped water and crumbled into ashes. He was demonstrating as a symbol how the one tile could consist of three elements, similar to the Holy Trinity. He died in 348 in his native Cyprus.

It was observed that his relics remained incorrupt and became a source of many miracles. For the next 300 years, they remained in Cyprus. In 655, according to his biographer Bishop Theodore of Paphos, they were placed in a church in Trimythous, Cyprus. Due to the Arabic raids on Cyprus, they were transferred to Constantinople by order of the Emperor Justinian II in 691. There, they were kept in the convent of the Panagia Kecharitomene, next to the monastery of Christ Philanthropos. Then, for centuries, they were venerated in a side chapel in the Church of the Holy Apostles. A few months prior to the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, on December 12th, 1452, a festive liturgy was celebrated in the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia to celebrate the reunion of the Orthodox and the Catholic Churches, and the relics of St. Spiridon were processed amidst much pomp in honor of his feast. Shortly afterwards, in 1456, the relics were transferred to Kerkyra in Corfu. In 1489, Philip Kalohairetis tried to bring the relics to Venice, but this did not take place and they remained in Kerkyra. Through the centuries, the relics have regularly been carried exposed in procession around the island of Corfu. One such procession was instituted by the Venetians in 1673, in gratitude for surviving a plague that swept the island that year. Another was instituted in 1716 in celebration of the liberation of the island from a possible Turkish invasion. He is the principal patron saint of the islands of Corfu, Kephalonia, and Zakynthos.

In 1809, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded the Papal States, captured Pope Pius VII, and deported him from Rome to Savona, in northwestern Italy, where he remained in exile until the fall of Napoleon in 1815. The Pope's sacristan and confessor was the Augustinian Archbishop, Venerable Joseph Bartholomew Menochio, who stayed in Rome during the pope's exile and managed things while he was away. He refused to take the oath of fidelity to Napoleon, even though he was under great pressure to do so. One of his duties during this period was the certification of relics. The Shrine of All Saints possesses a substantial relic of a toe bone of St. Spiridon, along with its certification document, signed by Archbishop Menochio on February 8, 1809. It was originally kept in the chapel of the French princes De Rohan, until it was exchanged with their Italian cousins, the Lyoi Lupis Giovanazzos, for a relic of St. Nicholas of Myra. The head of the Lyoi Lupis Giovanazzo family is a marquis, Baron of Castania and Cuzzoghieri, and a patrician of Giovanazzo, with a palace in Giovanazzo, Apulia, Italy. The relic of St. Spiridon remained in their palace chapel until 2014, when a young man in the family, who is addicted to gambling, placed the relic with an entrepreneur named Franco D'Ambrosio. He wanted him to sell the relic for 2000 Euros, to cover the dept. Mr. D'Ambrosio was so offended that such a sacred relic could be used in this manner that he personally paid off the debt and then donated the relic as a gift to our Shrine of All Saints.​​

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