Saints: Who They Are and How They Help You - Hardcover

Chapter 1

States of Life

To every thing there is a season.
ECCLESIASTES 3:1

Love
Valentine
(third century)

The patron saint of love has been identified with two early Christians: a priest martyred in Rome in c. 269 and buried on the Flaminian way north of the city, and a bishop of Terni, in Umbria, who was also executed in Rome. Although ecclesiastical authorities in the seventeenth century asserted that they were the same person, some modern experts believe the priest-martyr to be the real Valentine.

The reasons for his association with lovers are also disputed. One possibility is that it derives from the centuries-old belief that birds choose their mates on 14 February, the saint's feast day; another, that it is a survival from the Roman festival of Lupercalia held in mid-February to secure fertility and keep evil away.

What is certain is that troubled lovers have invoked him since medieval times, and that the custom of sending a Valentine's Day card to a chosen partner, first commercialized in the United States in the 1840s, has grown into a major industry.

Third century; identity disputed
FEAST DAY: 14 February

Fatherhood and Families
Joseph
(first century)

Husband of the Blessed Virgin Mary and foster father to Jesus, Joseph was, according to the New Testament, betrothed to Mary at the time of the Annunciation. Although descended from David, the king of the Jews, he was poor and a carpenter by trade. St. Matthew's Gospel describes him as a just man and records how his initial distress at Mary's pregnancy was dispelled by an angelic vision; and it tells of how, after a warning in a dream, he took his family to Egypt to escape Herod's persecution. After the king's death, and again in response to a dream, Joseph returned to Israel. Here, fearing Herod's son, Archelaus, who reigned in Judea, he settled in Nazareth in Galilee.

His last appearance in the New Testament is when he and Mary, on their way back from celebrating the Passover at Jerusalem, are forced to return to the city to find the 12-year-old Jesus who was preaching in the Temple. Most authorities believe that Joseph was dead by the time of the Crucifixion.

In art he is generally depicted as old, but this tradition rests on apocryphal sources; he was more likely to have been a young man at the time of the Nativity. His steadfastness as a guardian and husband is the basis for his patronage of fathers of families.

First century
FEAST DAYS: 19 March; 1 May CULT: Popular in East from the sixth century, but not widespread in West until the sixteenth; 1 May declared the feast of Joseph the Worker by Pius XII in 1955
OTHER PATRONAGES: Bursars; engineers; house hunters; manual workers, especially carpenters
ALSO INVOKED: By those in doubt; people who desire a holy death

Motherhood
Blessed Virgin Mary
(first century)

As the mother of Jesus, Mary is the most powerful of all the saints; and as the ultimate symbol of motherhood she is invoked to meet every need. But details of her life are sparse.

According to unsubstantiated tradition, she was the daughter of St. Joachim and St. Anne and was presented and dedicated as a virgin at the Temple in Jerusalem. St. Luke's Gospel records that after her betrothal to Joseph, the archangel Gabriel appeared to her at Nazareth to announce that she had been chosen by God to be the mother of Jesus; and that she then visited her cousin Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist. She and Joseph went to Bethlehem for a tax census after their marriage, and here Jesus was born. The family's flight into Egypt to escape from King Herod Is described in St. Matthew's Gospel, as is their return to Nazareth.

Mary remains a shadowy figure in accounts of Christ's public life. She is recorded in the New Testament as visiting Jerusalem at the Passover when Jesus was 12; as attending the marriage at Cana in Galilee when Jesus turned water into wine -- his first miracle; as trying to see Jesus while he was teaching; as present at the Crucifixion -- "Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother," -- when Jesus gave her into the care of St. John the Apostle. It is assumed that from that time she lived in his household.

Mary remained with the apostles after Christ's ascension into heaven -- the last time she is mentioned in the Bible. Nothing is known of Mary's last years, nor of how or even when she died.

From the fifth century many Christians have believed that she was assumed directly into heaven and that she remained a virgin throughout her life. In 1854 the Roman Catholic church proclaimed that Mary was conceived and born unsoiled by original sin -- Immaculate Conception -- and (in 1950) that she was taken up into heaven upon her death -- Assumption. The "highest of God's creatures," as St. Thomas Aquinas called her, has been the object of special cults and devotions throughout the Christian world and has literally fulfilled her prophecy (Luke 1:48) that "all generations shall call me blessed."

First century
PRINCIPAL FEAST DAYS: Purification 2 February; Annunciation 25 March; Visitation 2 July; Assumption 15 August; Nativity 8 September; Immaculate Conception 8 December
CULT: Ubiquitous; some important modern centers include Loreto (Italy), Lourdes (France), and Guadalupe (Mexico)
EMBLEM: Normally portrayed holding her infant son

Discretion
John of Nepomuk
(c. 1345-1393)

The invocation of this saint when discretion is needed is based on a fallacious story -- that John was murdered on the orders of Wenceslas IV, king of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, for refusing to divulge the confession of the king's wife, Sophie.

In reality John died because of his involvement in a series of disputes between king and clergy. Educated at the Universities of Prague and Padua and vicar-general to the bishop of Prague from 1389, he was drawn into the bishop's struggles with the king over ecclesiastical rights. Although John was retiring by nature -- he repeatedly refused bishoprics that were offered to him -- his integrity would not allow him to stand by when he discovered that the king planned to reward an unworthy favorite with an abbey when its aged abbot died. To prevent this, he helped the monks to elect a new abbot so quickly that the news reached Wenceslas at the same time as that of the abbot's death.

On the king's orders John was killed by being burned, then tied to a wheel and thrown off a bridge into the River Moldau. He was buried in St. Virus' Cathedral in Prague -- where he became a symbol of Bohemian nationalism.

c. 1345 born John Wolflin, Nepomuk, Bohemia; c. 1380 ordained priest; 1387 obtained doctorate of low at the University of Padua; 1389 became vicar-general to John of Genzenstein, bishop of Prague; 20 March 1393 died Prague; 1729 canonized
FEAST DAY: 16 May
OTHER PATRONAGES: Bohemia; Czechoslovakia; bridges; running water; silence
ALSO INVOKED: Against floods; slander

Charitable Giving
Vincent de Paul
(1581-1660)

Vincent de Paul's was a life of contrasts. Born into a peasant family in Gascony, France, he was ordained priest in 1601 at the early age of 19 and became a chaplain at the court of Henry IV of France. Here he was falsely accused of theft but remained silent for six months, after which his innocence was proved. His conversion dated from this episode. For the rest of his life, he combined his work among the rich and fashionable with tending society's outcasts: the sick and poverty stricken, galley prisoners and abandoned children. Although he was short-tempered and unprepossessing in appearance, Vincent's charisma, his burning love of God, his self-control, sensitivity to the feelings of others and his dedication to relieving human suffering attracted followers from all