History of St. John the Baptist Day

The Feast of St. John the Baptist, or the Nativity of St John the Forerunner, sometimes called St. John the Baptist Day, is celebrated on June 24 in many places around the world, though not much in the United States, as we’ll see below.

Celebration of the Feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist goes back at least a millennium and a half. At the Council of Agde, it mentions the feast in 506 AD in its…