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• St. Agnes of Rome

  When the order against Christians was published she did not wait to be found out. She said what she was, in the open, and she was twelve or thirteen years old.

  Feast January 21 · Rome

• St. Albert the Great

  He studied and classified plants, animals, minerals and the stars by observation, taught that experiment is the only safe guide in such work, and made Aristotle usable by Christian theology.

  Feast November 15 · Swabia, and Cologne

• St. Alphonsus Liguori

  He founded the Redemptorists to preach in mountain villages nobody else reached, gathered the poorest of Naples into evening prayer groups, and wrote the moral theology that told confessors to be gentle.

  Feast August 1 · the Kingdom of Naples

• St. Andrew the Apostle

  He was the first of the apostles to be called, and the first thing he did with it was fetch his brother: we have found the Messiah. He kept doing it — bringing forward the boy with the loaves, bringing the Greeks who asked to see Jesus.

  Feast November 30 · Galilee and Achaia

• St. Anne

  The mother of the Virgin Mary in Christian tradition; she is not named in any of the four Gospels, and her story comes from the second-century Protoevangelium of James.

  Feast July 26 · Judea

• St. Anthony of Padua

  His preaching got a law passed at Padua protecting people who could not pay their debts, freed prisoners and debtors, and he risked his life asking a tyrant to release the ones he held.

  Feast June 13 · Lisbon, Portugal and Padua, Italy

• St. Augustine of Hippo

  He sold everything he owned and gave the money to the poor, made his own house a monastery, looked after the poor and orphans of Hippo, answered the questions of the whole known world by letter, and stayed in the city under siege rather than leave his people.

  Feast August 28 · Tagaste and Hippo, North Africa

• St. Bartholomew the Apostle

  He changed his mind in public. He had said out loud that nothing good could come out of Nazareth; a few minutes later, having gone to look for himself, he was the one calling Jesus the Son of God and the King of Israel. He never defended the first position.

  Feast August 24 · No place is recorded

• St. Bernadette Soubirous

  She saw the apparitions at Lourdes at fourteen, told the truth about them for the rest of her life, and then spent thirteen years as an ordinary nursing sister at Nevers, deliberately out of sight.

  Lourdes in the Pyrenees, and the convent of Saint-Gildard at Nevers

• St. Bonaventure

  He wrote the life of Francis of Assisi that the Franciscans adopted as their official one, and governed more than thirty thousand friars for seventeen years while the order split over how strictly to keep the Rule.

  Feast July 15 · Bagnoregio in Lazio, and Paris

• St. Bridget of Sweden

  She raised eight children, founded a small hospital with her husband and attended the sick in it herself, and then, widowed, moved to Rome and spent twenty-four years telling popes to their faces to leave Avignon.

  Feast July 23 · Uppland, Sweden, and Rome

• St. Carlo Acutis

  He treated the Eucharist as the center of an ordinary teenage life, and used what he was good at — building web pages — to serve his parish and school.

  Milan, Italy

• St. Casimir

  A prince of Poland who claimed the Hungarian throne at thirteen, came home a fugitive, refused the marriage arranged for him, and died at Grodno in 1484.

  Feast March 4 · Poland and Lithuania

• St. Catherine of Siena

  She nursed people with diseases nobody else would touch, then talked a pope into leaving Avignon and coming back to Rome — a woman who could barely read, telling the head of the Church what to do.

  Feast April 29 · Siena, Italy

• St. Cecilia

  Her grave lies in the catacomb of Callistus, immediately beside the crypt of the popes — the most honored ground in Christian Rome — and the Church has kept her name there since the fourth century.

  Feast November 22 · Rome

• St. Christopher

  He died as a martyr, killed for holding to Christ. Almost nothing else about him is certain — but Christians in both East and West were honouring him within a few hundred years, and have never stopped.

  Asia Minor, traditionally Lycia

• St. Clare of Assisi

  Although she was the abbess she nursed the sick sisters herself and took the worst jobs, and from her sickbed she spun thread for more than a hundred altar cloths and sent them to the churches around Assisi.

  Feast August 11 · Assisi, Italy

• St. Cyril

  Asked to bring the Gospel to people whose language had never been written down, he built them an alphabet and translated the Scriptures and the liturgy into it, then defended in Rome their right to pray in their own tongue against churchmen who insisted on Hebrew, Greek and Latin.

  Feast February 14 · Thessalonica, and Great Moravia

• St. Damien of Molokai

  He volunteered for a leprosy settlement no one could be ordered to enter, stayed sixteen years, and went on caring for the people there after he had caught the disease himself.

  Feast May 10 · Tremelo in Belgium, and Molokai in the Hawaiian Islands

• St. Dominic

  He sold his own annotated books to feed the starving of Palencia, and twice tried to sell himself into slavery to ransom captives. Then he sent his seventeen followers out across Europe to preach.

  Feast August 8 · Caleruega, Castile, and Bologna

• St. Elizabeth of Hungary

  She built a hospital of twenty-eight beds below the Wartburg and went down to the patients every day, fed nine hundred poor people daily, and spent her last three years nursing the sick in a second hospital at Marburg, where she waited on them at her own table.

  Feast November 17 · Hungary, and Thuringia and Hesse in Germany

• St. Faustina Kowalska

  At sixteen she went into domestic service to support herself and help her parents, and for thirteen years afterwards she cooked, gardened and kept the door of her convent while writing the diary she had been told to keep.

  Feast October 5 · Głogowiec and Kraków, Poland

• St. Francis de Sales

  He walked a hostile district of Savoy for four years preaching, and when nobody would come and hear him he wrote his arguments on leaflets and scattered them until people did.

  Feast January 24 · Savoy, and the Diocese of Geneva at Annecy

• St. Francis of Assisi

  He got down off his horse to embrace a leper and gave him all his money, went to live among lepers and ate out of the same bowl, and gave away everything he owned to the poor.

  Feast October 4 · Assisi, Italy

• St. Gabriel the Archangel

  He carries messages people cannot possibly be ready for. He told Zechariah he would have a son, and he asked Mary whether she would be the mother of the Savior, and then waited for her answer.

  Feast September 29 · Nazareth and the Temple at Jerusalem, where Scripture places his appearances

• St. Hildegard of Bingen

  She dictated three books of visions, seventy hymns with their melodies and two medical treatises from a monastery, preached in public squares at Cologne and Mainz, and told an emperor to his face that he would answer to God.

  Feast September 17 · Bingen, Rhineland, Germany

• 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

• St. Kateri Tekakwitha

  She spent her last three years at the mission caring for people who were sick and in need, and made a vow of virginity recorded as the first of its kind among the native peoples of North America.

  Feast July 14 · Ossernenon, New York, and a mission near Montreal

• St. Katharine Drexel

  She gave away one of the great American fortunes and then her own life with it, founding and paying for nearly sixty schools and missions for Native American and Black children, and Xavier University of Louisiana.

  Feast March 3 · Philadelphia and the United States

• St. Lawrence of Rome

  He was one of the seven deacons of the Roman Church. When Valerian's edict ordered every bishop, priest and deacon killed at once, he was the last of the seven to die, four days after the pope, on 10 August 258. What he is famous for saying is in no early account.

  Feast August 10 · Rome

• St. Lazarus

  The brother of Martha and Mary whom Jesus raised from the dead at Bethany, after which the chief priests wanted him killed too.

  Feast July 29 · Bethany

• St. Leo the Great

  He wrote the letter on Christ's two natures that the Council of Chalcedon accepted as the Church's faith, went north to meet Attila and talked him into leaving Italy, and walked out defenceless to meet Genseric's Vandals and ask them to spare Rome.

  Feast November 10 · Tuscany and Rome

• St. Louis Martin

  He gave up the monastery when the Latin defeated him and became a watchmaker instead, raised five daughters alone after his wife died, and walked three of them to the Carmel door.

  Alençon and Lisieux, France

• St. Lucy

  She talked her mother into letting her give away most of the family money to the poor of Syracuse, and the man she was promised to reported her to the governor for it.

  Feast December 13 · Syracuse, Sicily

• St. Luke the Evangelist

  He stayed. Writing for the last time from prison, Paul lists the man who had left him for the world and then says: only Luke is with me. He had already given years to walking beside him, and the account we have of those journeys is his because he was there.

  Feast October 18 · Antioch and the journeys of Paul

• St. Margaret of Scotland

  An Anglo-Saxon princess who married Malcolm III of Scotland, held a synod to reform the Scottish church, founded Dunfermline Abbey, and died at Edinburgh in 1093.

  Feast November 16 · Scotland

• St. Maria Goretti

  She forgave the man who stabbed her before she died, and asked to meet him in heaven; he later admitted what he had done, asked her family's pardon, and expiated it.

  Feast July 6 · Le Ferriere, Italy

• St. Mark

  He went as assistant on the first missionary journey, turned back, and returned years later to be useful to Paul at Rome. Papias says he was Peter's interpreter and wrote his preaching down accurately, though not in order.

  Feast April 25 · Jerusalem and Alexandria

• St. Martha

  The sister of Mary and Lazarus who fed Jesus at Bethany and told him plainly what she thought; since 2021 the three are remembered together.

  Feast July 29 · Bethany

• St. Mary Magdalene

  She followed Jesus from Galilee and stayed to the end: she stood at the cross, saw where he was buried, went back to the tomb on the Sunday, and carried the news of the Resurrection to the apostles.

  Feast July 22 · Galilee and Jerusalem

• St. Mary of Bethany

  The sister of Martha and Lazarus who sat listening at Jesus' feet and anointed him at Bethany; since 2021 the three share 29 July.

  Feast July 29 · Bethany

• St. Matthew the Apostle

  Four words carry him: “he rose and followed him”. Jesus called a man everyone else had written off, at his table, in the middle of a job nobody admired, and he got up and went — leaving the money behind and taking Jesus home to dinner with the rest of the tax collectors.

  Feast September 21 · Capernaum in Galilee

• St. Matthias the Apostle

  He took the traitor’s place. The office was open because Judas had betrayed Jesus and was gone, and Matthias let himself be put forward for it, was chosen by lot, and was counted among the apostles from that day. What he did afterward nobody wrote down.

  Feast May 14 · No place is recorded

• St. Maximilian Kolbe

  He built a publishing operation that reached a million readers, sheltered refugees and Jews when the Nazis came, and at Auschwitz stepped out of the line to die in another man's place.

  Feast August 14 · Poland

• St. Methodius

  He promised his dying brother he would not abandon the Slavs for the quiet of a monastery, and he kept it for the sixteen years he outlived him — through a trial, imprisonment and repeated accusations — translating the Scriptures into their language and training the disciples who carried the work on after him.

  Feast February 14 · Thessalonica, and Great Moravia and Pannonia

• St. Michael the Archangel

  Scripture puts him at the head of the angels who fight the dragon. The Church asks him to fight the devil, to guard people at the hour of death, and to bring souls to judgment.

  Feast September 29 · Phrygia and Monte Gargano, the earliest centres of his cult

• St. Monica

  When two people were at odds she would carry nothing between them except what might bring them back together. She prayed for her son through seventeen years of his resistance, and she got him.

  Feast August 27 · Tagaste, North Africa, and Ostia, Italy

• St. Nicholas

  Justinian raised a church in his honor at Constantinople in the sixth century, and in 1087 Italian merchants stole his body from Myra for Bari, where it lies still. The honor is far better attested than the stories.

  Feast December 6 · Myra, in Lycia

• St. Padre Pio

  For more than fifty years he heard confessions at San Giovanni Rotondo for anyone who came, and he built a hospital there — the House for the Relief of Suffering — insisting the medicine practiced in it be human.

  Feast September 23 · Pietrelcina and San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy

• St. Patrick

  He returned as a bishop to the country where he had been a slave, preached across Ireland in the language he learned in captivity, and organized its church: through me many peoples were born again in God.

  Feast March 17 · Ireland

• St. Paul

  He founded churches across the empire, made tents so as not to burden them, and gathered from those Gentile churches a collection for the poor of Jerusalem he called a liturgy.

  Feast June 29 · Tarsus and Rome

• St. Peter

  He answered for the Twelve that Jesus was the Christ, baptized the centurion Cornelius and so opened the Church to Gentiles, and spoke the deciding word at the Council of Jerusalem.

  Feast June 29 · Galilee and Rome

• St. Peter Damian

  He left a teaching career to live as a hermit, then wrote a treatise naming the vices of the clergy of his day and made enemies with it. Sent to Milan as the pope’s legate, he faced down a rioting crowd in the cathedral and got both sides to accept his ruling.

  Feast February 21 · Ravenna, and the hermitage of Fonte Avellana

• St. Philip the Apostle

  He did not argue. When Nathanael asked whether anything good could come out of Nazareth, Philip did not defend the answer — he said “Come and see”, and let Jesus do the rest. He did the same thing later for the Greeks who wanted to meet him.

  Feast May 3 · Bethsaida on Lake Genesareth

• St. Pier Giorgio Frassati

  He hauled supplies to the poor of Turin himself, gave away his own money, and never treated his faith as a private thing.

  Turin, Italy

• St. Polycarp

  Asked to save his life by cursing Christ, he answered that he had served him eighty-six years and been done no harm, and asked how he could curse the King who saved him. He said it out loud, in a stadium, to a proconsul offering him a way out.

  Feast February 23 · Smyrna

• St. Raphael the Archangel

  He walks the whole way there and back with a frightened young man without saying who he is, gets him safely married, drives off what was destroying the marriage, and cures his father's blindness.

  Feast September 29 · the road from Nineveh to Media, where the Book of Tobit places his journey

• St. Rita of Cascia

  Married at twelve to a violent man and widowed by murder, she begged Heaven to stop her sons taking revenge, then entered the Augustinians at Cascia.

  Feast May 22 · Cascia, Italy

• St. Rose of Lima

  Born Isabel Flores de Oliva in colonial Lima, a Dominican laywoman who lived in severe penance in her parents' garden and became the first canonized saint of the Americas.

  Feast August 23 · Peru

• St. Rose Philippine Duchesne

  She took the Society of the Sacred Heart out of France, opened the first free school west of the Mississippi, and at seventy-two went to the Potawatomi to pray for work she could not do.

  Feast November 18 · Grenoble and the Missouri frontier

• St. Sebastian

  A Roman martyr commemorated in a list compiled in 354 and buried on the Via Appia; the soldier, the archers and the arrows come from Acts the sources reject.

  Feast January 20 · Rome

• St. Simon the Zealot

  He was called the Zealot for the fierceness of his attachment to the Law, and he spent his life alongside Matthew, who had collected taxes for the occupying power. Whatever he had been before, he stayed in a group that contained the man he had every reason to despise.

  Feast October 28 · No place is recorded

• St. Stephen the Protomartyr

  Chosen as one of seven men to see that the Greek-speaking widows were not passed over in the daily distribution, he preached as well as served, reading the Old Testament as a book about Christ, and died asking God not to charge the killing to the men who were stoning him.

  Feast December 26 · Jerusalem

• St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

  She nursed typhus patients in an Austrian field hospital during the first war, taught for years at a convent school, and refused an offer of rescue rather than be spared what her people were suffering.

  Feast August 9 · Breslau, Germany, and Auschwitz

• St. Teresa of Ávila

  Sick most of her life and with no schooling, she founded seventeen convents against furious opposition, started the Discalced friars with John of the Cross, and wrote the books that taught the Church to pray.

  Feast October 15 · Ávila and Alba de Tormes, Spain

• St. Teresa of Calcutta

  She left a comfortable teaching post to live among the dying poor of Calcutta, founded an order that followed her onto every continent, and did it while feeling abandoned by the God she was doing it for.

  Feast September 5 · Skopje, and Calcutta in India

• St. Thérèse of Lisieux

  She taught the novices in her care the little way she had found, carried two missionary priests in prayer as her assigned brothers, and left the manuscripts the Church later declared doctrine.

  Feast October 1 · Alençon and Lisieux, France

• St. Thomas Aquinas

  He wrote the Summa Theologiae and the Summa contra gentiles, arguing that faith and reason cannot finally contradict each other, and he taught in the schools of Paris, Cologne, Rome and Naples for more than twenty years.

  Feast January 28 · the Kingdom of Naples, and Paris

• St. Thomas More

  As Lord Chancellor he promoted justice and restrained those who profited at the expense of the weak. He then refused the oath making Henry VIII head of the Church in England, and died rather than swear it.

  Feast June 22 · England

• St. Thomas the Apostle

  He asked for proof and then went further than anyone who had not. Shown the wounds, he did not say that he believed — he said “My Lord and my God”, which Benedict XVI calls the most splendid profession of faith in the whole of the New Testament.

  Feast July 3 · India, by tradition

• St. Vincent de Paul

  Twelve abandoned babies were bought, drawn by lot, and put into care at his prompting; years later the number was four thousand. He visited the galley convicts in their dungeons, and at his death his priests directed eleven seminaries.

  Feast September 27 · Gascony, and Paris

• St. Wenceslaus

  The duke of Bohemia raised Christian by his grandmother Ludmila and murdered by his brother; he has been called the patron of Bohemia ever since.

  Feast September 28 · Bohemia

• St. Zélie Martin

  She learned Alençon point at the lace school, built a business that supported her whole family by selling to Paris society, and bore nine children, four of whom she buried.

  Alençon, France