"Only God makes saints. Still, it is up to us to tell their
stories"
--Kenneth L. Woodward, author of Making Saints
In the early 4th century, this woman became a prostitute and ran a brothel. During the Diocletian persecutions, she gave refuge to a fugitive bishop, and was duly converted, along with the rest of her employees.
They were arrested eventually, and brought to trial. Afra faced a judge who had once purchased her favors. She was ordered to sacrifice to the gods, but cleverly debated the judge, somewhere along the line saying, "My body has sinned, let it suffer. But I will not corrupt my soul by idolatry." The judge, however, was not moved by her debating. He ordered her burned to death. Her mother and three servents carried away the body and gave it a proper burial, for which they were put to death.
Because of Afra's occupation, she is, obviously, the patron saint of fallen women.
Not much is known about the Blessed Virgin Mary's parents, except for their names, Joachim and Anne. These names are found in an early apocryphal writing entitled the Protevangelium of James. This tells of the origins of Mary, but bears a striking resemblance to the story of Samuel's birth in the Old Testament.
She conceived her daughter "immaculately", which means without the original sin normally transmitted through sexual intercourse. The people of Brittainy, in France, believed that she was a native of Brittainy, and had traveled to Judaea in a "ship of light". It was also believed that she returned in her old age with her grandson, Jesus Christ.
Saint Anne is the patron saint of mothers, grandmothers, and is prayed to for safe deliveries.
Saint Wilfrid refused, and helped Audrey escape. She fled south, with her husband following. They reached a promontory known as Colbert's Head, where a heaven sent seven day high tide separated the two. Eventually, Audrey's husband left and married someone more willing, while Audrey took the veil, and founded the great abbey of Ely, where she lived an austere life. She eventually died of an enormous and unsightly tumor on her neck, which she gratefully accepted as Divine retribution for all the necklaces she had worn in her early years.
Throughout the Middle Ages, a festival, "St. Audrey's Fair", was held at Ely on her feast day. The exceptional shodiness of the merchandise, especially the neckerchiefs, contributed to the English language the word "tawdry", a corruption of "Saint Audrey."
It would be impossible to measure the impact that Saint Augustine had upon Christianity. The Pope still defers to his wisdom about birth control, and it was from his philosophy that John Calvin discovered predestination.
Augustine was born in North Africa in 354. His father was pagan, but his mother, Saint Monica, was especially pious. As a young man, Augustine was quite wild. "Like water I boiled over, heated by my fornications," as he puts it in his famous Confessions. He joined the Manichaean heresy with his mistress and their son, much to his mother's dismay. However, after moving to Milan, the impassioned entreaties by his mother and the sermons of Saint Ambrose finally got to him, and he converted to Christianity.
He eventually made his way to become Bishop of Hippo. There, he wrote prodigiously, including the aforementioned Confessions and The City of God. In his writings, he developed several theories, including that all the unbaptized, including infants, go straight to hell, and that the "original sin" of Adam and Eve was connected to sexual pleasure, which was how the sin was passed on.
The city of St. Augustine, Florida created on his feast day in 1565, when the Spanish landed in America, making it the oldest still existing city in the New World.
She has been associated with the persecutions under the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, and supposedly scourged to death.
Because the Spanish pronounce the letter "V" as the Romans pronounced the letter "B", it was thought that Viviana's name (which means "full of life") was Bibiana (which means "full of drink"). Therefore, they invoked her protection against the sufferings brought on by nights of alcoholic consumption.
One stormy night, a small child appeared, and wanted to be carried across the raging river. Christopher begun his journey, and noticed that the child grew heavier and heavier with each step. He barely made it to the shore. Once on the shore, the child revealed himself to be Jesus Christ, and told him "You have carried the weight of the entire world, for I am the King of kings." Christopher begun, after that encounter, a life of preaching all over the Old World.
Saint Christopher was popular in the Middle Ages, due to a belief that whoever looked upon his image would not die that day. In 1969, the Catholic Church struck him from the official liturgical calendar (Christopher being obviously fictious), but, being the patron saint of travellers, he has remained one of the most popular and well loved saints, and many non-Catholics keep a St. Christopher's medal in their cars.
Saint Dymphna was an Irish warlord's daughter. Her mother died when she was a teenager, and her father was very grief-stricken. He searched the entire Western world for a woman to replace his beloved wife, but none could be found. Maddened by grief, he returned, and saw that his daughter was as beautiful as her mother was. She tried to fight off his advances with respect, but eventually realized that there was no way she could put up a fight. She fled to Belgium with Father Gerebran, an elderly priest, and her father's court jester and his wife.
Dymphna's father began to search for them, and eventually landed in Belgium, where an innkeeper would not serve them. It turned out that the innkeeper had trouble exchanging that particular type of money before. Dymphna's father knew that she was in the area and eventually found her. There, in Geel, he killed Father Gerebran and demanded that Dymphna accede to his demands. When she refused, he slew her in a rage.
The site where Dymphna died is known for its miraculous healings of the insane and possessed. There is now a well-known institution upon the site as well. Dymphna is also the patron saint of sufferers of mental and nervous illnesses.
Elizabeth Seton was born into a prominent New York Episcopalian family in 1774. At twenty, she married Richard (or William) Seton, a professor of anatomy. The happy marriage produced five children, but, after only a few years, tragedy struck. The business went bankrupt, and her husband became ill. Elizabeth took him to Italy in the hope of recovery, but he died in quarantine at the docks in Livorno, Italy in 1803.
A devout Catholic Italian family took care of Elizabeth while in Italy, and so impressed her that, two years after her husband's death, she converted to Catholicism. Her family was completely against the conversion, and took away their love and support of her and her children.
The next few years were difficult, but Elizabeth managed it with her sunny disposition and her complete trust in God's will. News of her teaching abilities reached Bishop Carroll in Maryland, and he asked her to open a school for girls. After much hard work and devotion, she founded a religious community, the Sisters of Charity (which was the first American religious society), and established a school near Emmitsburg, MD, which was also the beginning of the Catholic parochial school system in the United States. She died in Emmitsburg in 1821, and was canonized in 1975, making her the first American-born saint.
Saint Faith is known because of the church where her charred remains are kept in an exquisite reliquary in the church named after her in Conques, France. This church, Sainte-Foy, is known to many art and architecture history students because it is a perfect example of the Romanesque period.
Gertrude's parents, Pepin of Landen & Itta, were known for their piety. When Pepin died in 640, Itta founded a convent at Nivelles, Belgium, and appointed Gertrude as abbess when Itta deemed she was old enough.
"Old enough" was very young, in Gertrude's case. But she worked through her problems, helping Irish monks convert Belgium. She became famous for her hospitality. She retired at the age of thirty and died soon afterwards.
She is still invoked against rodents in her native land. It is said that water from her well and cakes baked in her convent will keep them away. Possibly because of this power, she is the patroness of cats. She is also believed to be the saint that the recently deceased spend their first night with.
Giles is one of those very popular middle ages saints that not much is historically known about. The center of his cult was at Saint-Gilles, near Arles, France, and it's possible that he was a hermit in that area before the ninth century.
One of the legends surrounding him is that he had a pet deer (or hind), and one day, it was hunted in the woods by the hounds of the Visigoth king Wamba. Wamba shot an arrow, and when the king followed it, he discovered Giles, wounded by the arrow, protecting the deer in his arms, and the hounds held perfectly in place by an invisible power.
Giles is the patron saint of cripples and the indigent, and there are over 150 churches in Great Britain alone dedicated in his honor. His emblem is an arrow.
Helena married the Roman emperor Constantius Chlorus in 270 AD, and gave birth to Constantine in 274. In 292, Constantius divorced Helena for political reasons, but when Constantine became emperor, he treated his mother with respect. She had, somewhere between the divorce and her son's ascension, converted to Christianity, and when Constantine made it the official religion of the Holy Roman Empire, Helena became an enthusiastic supporter, spreading Christianity through Rome.
Helena eventually decided to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. There, she found the site where Christ was crucified, and found the original Cross. After excavating the Cross, she then miraculously found the nails used to crucify Jesus, and the robe he wore. She returned to Rome a success.
Because of her finds, Helena is the patron saint of archaeologists. But her story was not made into The Robe, as popular trivia would hold.
At the age of thirty-three, Ignatius went back to school. By the age of forty-three, he was a Master of Arts in Paris, where he was twice imprisioned for his unorthodox evangelical methods by the Inquisition.
His disciples, Bodaiela, Favre, Lainez, Rodrigues, Salmeron, and Xavier, remained loyal to his cause and after becoming priests, they became, in 1540, the first members of the Society of Jesus, better known to us as Jesuits. The Jesuits are renowned throughout the world for their work as missionaries.
John de Yepes was a Spaniard of a good family that had become poor. He became a Carmelite friar, and knew St. Theresa of Avila. He joined a group of reformers and worked to spread the reform across Spain. Unfortunately, this was during the Spanish Inquisition, and he was summarily imprisoned at Toledo.
It was during his imprisonment that he began writing poetry. He wrote many poems, but his most famous is Dark Night of the Soul, which is not about depression, but is instead about the soul's mystical marriage to Christ. He was a mystic as well as an exquisite poet.
During the last year of her life, her body begin have a sickly sweet aroma. Her limbs began to decompose, her ears and nose fell off, she stopped excreting, and her intestines ruptured and fell from for abdomen. Her parents, in admiration of their daughter's devotion to God (and a knowledge of the possible wealth that would come from her relics), collected the pieces that fell from her body and placed them in a vase beside her bed. Eventually, Lydwina choked to death on her own phelgm and died.
Despite all this, she is known as the patron saint of skaters.
Maximillian Kolbe was born to hardworking parents in Poland in 1894. After entered the priesthood, he began publishing a monthly review, Knight of the Immaculate. He founded Niepokalanow ("City of the Immaculate"), a Franciscan friary, at Teresin, Poland, which was self-supporting and published Knight as well as a daily Catholic newspaper and eventually a radio station.
In 1930, Father Maximillian and four fathers went to Japan, with no knowledge of the language, and founded there Mugenzai-no Sono ("Garden of the Immaculate") in Nagasaki, a place which, in 1945, managed to escape the devastation of the atomic bomb. Maximillian made no attempt at "westernizing the primitives", but instead studied the Japanese culture, including Shintoism and Buddhism. He also attempted to found similar sites in India and in Russia, but was called back to Poland in 1936 because of his health. In 1939, the German army invaded Teresin. After a brief imprisonment, the community at Niepokalanow set to the task of caring for 3,000 refugees, of two-thirds of which were Jewish. In 1941, the Germans arrested him and sent him to Auschwitz.
Survivors from Auschwitz remember his extraordinary benevolence and his saintly behavior. Wine and bread were smuggled in and he gave Communion to whomever asked. One day, ten prisoners were chosen to die in the underground starvation cell as punishment for three who had escaped. One of them, Franciszek Gajownieck, begged not to be sent down there, because of his wife and children. Father Maximillian stood, and asked to be sent down in his place. As he said, "I am a Catholic priest. I wish to die for that man. I am old; he has a wife and children." The SS commander agreed and sent him down.
Every day in that cell, Father Maximillian led the men in singing and prayers. After two weeks, only four men were left, including Father Maximillian, who was the only one conscious. The camp doctor came in, injected each man with carbolic acid, and watched them die.
Father Maximillian Kolbe was canonized on November 9th, 1982, with his sainthood defining a new category, "A martyr of charity." He is a saint for the twentieth century.
One of the most famous is how he rescued three young girls from prostitution. Their father was going to sell them because they had no dowry. Nicholas went to their house at night, and threw three bags of gold into their window, therefore giving them a dowry. These three gold bags have been passed down as icons throughout the years, eventually evolving into three gold balls, and displayed in front of pawn shops.
Another story is a tad more gruesome. During a famine, Nicholas went to the local butcher's, where, much to his surprise, he was served meat. Nicholas feared the worst, and went down to his host's cellar, where he found three barrels, filled with brine, containing the bodies of three boys. Nicholas restored them to life instantly.
Nicholas was martyred in the Diocletian persecution, which assured him sainthood. But it did not assure him world-wide fame. For we all know Saint Nicholas by his Dutch name--"Santa Claus".
Her legendary beauty distressed her, but by rubbing her face with pepper and her lips with quicklime, she discovered that she did not need to worry. She always wore a crown of roses in public, complete with 69 brow-piercing spikes. She lived in a shack in the family garden, where she was often seen dragging a heavy cross. She slept on piles of bricks, wore gloves filled with nettles, whipped herself with chains, and gouged out hunks of flesh with broken glass. One day, she announced to the city of Lima that, through her fervent prayers, she had saved the city from an earthquake. Since there had been no earthquake, the city held her in the highest regard, leading to her canonization a scant 53 years after her death.
As The Penguin Dictionary of Saints states, "...such saints pose delicate questions of religion and psychology."
Saint Theresa of Lisieux is a very popular modern saint. She was born in 1873, to Louis & Zelie Guerin Martin, in a very religious family. Four of Theresa's sisters became nuns, and in 1888, Theresa entered the convent of Lisieux, where two sisters already were. At the convent, her life was more or less completely typical of countless other young nuns. Through the daily rounds of prayer and work, the faults of pride and obstinacy to fight, a moodiness that could never quite go away, and all the other inward and outward trials to be faced, Theresa stuck to her "little way", a way of simple trust and love for God. Tuberculosis showed itself soon after she went into the convent, and she died at the age of twenty-four.
In 1895, Sister Theresa was told to write her recollection of her childhood. She did so, then added an account of her later life. This book, called The Story of a Soul, was edited (and partially rewritten) by her sister, Mother Agnes. The book swept the Catholic world, and many miracles and answers to prayers were attributed to her intercession in Heaven. She was canonized in 1925, the fastest canonization since the reform of the canonical process. In 1952, a version of Theresa's autobiography that did not have the rewriting by Mother Agnes was published, under the title Autobiography of a Saint.
A bouquet of roses that Theresa was given on her death bed was attributed with many miracles, which is why she is shown with rose petals in the icons.
This, of course, had the desired effect. It removed her from the "encumberances of men", hence her English name, Uncumber. Unhappy English wives used to leave bags of oats at her shrines, hoping that the Saint would use the bags of oats to lead their husbands' horses, with the riders, straight to the Devil.
It has been supposed that the creation of this saint was an explanation for crucifixes which dressed Christ in a long tunic.