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• St. James the Greater

  He was the first of the Twelve to die for it. Herod Agrippa killed him with the sword in Jerusalem, and Scripture records the fact in a single line with no story attached to it — which Benedict XVI reads as a sign of how ordinary such witness had already become.

  Feast July 25 · Galilee

• St. James the Less

  He found the settlement. At the council in Jerusalem he spoke after Peter and proposed the terms that let Gentile converts into the Church without binding them to the whole Mosaic law, asking only a few things of them out of respect for Jewish Christians. He went on keeping the law himself.

  Feast May 3 · Jerusalem, if he is the brother of the Lord

• St. Jane Frances de Chantal

  She founded the Visitation with Francis de Sales as an order that would take women too old, too poor or too frail for the harsh orders of the day, and governed it until it had eighty-six houses.

  Feast August 12 · Burgundy and Savoy

• St. Joan of Arc

  At seventeen she took an army to Orléans and broke the siege in nine days, taking an arrow in the breast the day before it lifted, then stood by with her banner while the king she had come for was crowned. At Rouen, threatened with torture, she would not call her voices lies.

  Domrémy and Rouen, France

• St. John Mary Vianney

  He heard confessions at Ars for sixteen hours a day, for anyone who came, through the last decade of his life, and taught the village catechism himself, every day, in the church.

  Feast August 4 · Dardilly and Ars, France

• St. John of the Cross

  He founded the Discalced Carmelite friars with Teresa of Ávila, was their first master of novices, and wrote the poems and treatises that map the soul's journey through darkness to God.

  Feast December 14 · Old Castile, and Andalusia

• St. John the Apostle

  Ordered by the Sanhedrin to stop preaching, he refused to his judges' faces: we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard. He guided the churches of Asia from Ephesus into extreme old age.

  Feast December 27 · Galilee and Ephesus

• St. John the Baptist

  He preached and baptized at the Jordan in camel hair, living on locusts and wild honey, and when Jesus came he pointed his own followers away from himself: he must increase, but I must decrease.

  Feast June 24 · Judea and the Jordan

• St. José Sánchez del Río

  At fourteen he carried the flag for the Catholic resistance in Mexico, never fought, and was tortured and killed for refusing to say he had given up his faith.

  Sahuayo, in Michoacán, Mexico

• St. Joseph

  He was the carpenter of Nazareth, working in wood and stone, and he taught the boy his trade, so that Jesus was known as the carpenter's son. He took Mary into his home when the law let him send her away, named the child, and carried the family into Egypt by night.

  Feast March 19 · Nazareth

• St. Josephine Bakhita

  She kept the door of the convent at Schio, laying her hands on the heads of the schoolchildren who passed, and traveled Italy telling people about the freedom she had been given.

  Feast February 8 · Darfur, Sudan, and Schio, Italy

• St. Juan Diego

  He carried a message to a bishop who did not believe him, and then spent the rest of his life in a hut beside the chapel, looking after the building and the pilgrims who came to it.

  Feast December 9 · Cuautitlán and Tepeyac, Mexico

• St. Jude

  At the Last Supper he asked the question nobody else asked: why show yourself to us and not to the world? It is the question of anyone who has ever wondered why God is not simply obvious, and it is the only sentence of his that survives.

  Feast October 28 · Palestine, if the Epistle is his