A
Saint Agnes of Rome
Feast day: 21 January
A Roman girl of about twelve who refused marriage and sacrifice to the gods, choosing death rather than betray her consecration to Christ; the most celebrated virgin martyr of the Latin Church.
Browse the encyclopedia
63 results
A
Saint Aloysius Gonzaga
Feast day: 21 June
An Italian marquis's heir who renounced his principality to become a Jesuit and died at twenty-three after nursing plague victims in Rome.
A
Saint Ambrose of Milan
Feast day: 7 December
Roman governor acclaimed bishop of Milan while still unbaptised, Ambrose became the great defender of the Church's freedom before emperors, the master of Latin hymnody, and the man who baptised Augustine.
A
Saint André Bessette
Feast day: 6 January
An illiterate, sickly Quebec porter of Holy Cross whose devotion to Saint Joseph drew thousands of cures and built the Oratory of Mount Royal.
A
Saint Andrew the Apostle
Feast day: 30 November
Brother of Simon Peter and a disciple of John the Baptist, Andrew was the first to follow Jesus and immediately brought his brother to him; tradition places his preaching in Greece and his martyrdom on a cross at Patras.
A
Saint Anthony of Padua
Feast day: 13 June
An Augustinian scholar who became a Franciscan preacher of extraordinary power, famous today as the finder of lost things.
A
Saint Athanasius of Alexandria
Feast day: 2 May
Deacon at Nicaea and then bishop of Alexandria for forty-five years, five times exiled, Athanasius almost single-handedly preserved the confession that the Son is 'consubstantial with the Father'.
A
Saint Augustine of Hippo
Feast day: 28 August
A brilliant, restless North African who lived far from God, was converted at thirty-two, and became the most influential theologian of the Latin Church.
B
Saint Benedict of Nursia
Feast day: 11 July
The monk whose short, humane Rule shaped Western monasticism and, with it, the culture of medieval Europe.
B
Saint Bernadette Soubirous
Feast day: 16 April
The asthmatic miller's daughter to whom the Immaculate Conception appeared eighteen times at Massabielle in 1858, and who then hid herself in a convent at Nevers.
C
Saint Carlo Acutis
Feast day: 12 October
An Italian teenager who used his gift for computers to catalogue Eucharistic miracles and died of leukaemia at fifteen, offering his sufferings for the Pope and the Church.
C
Saint Catherine of Siena
Feast day: 29 April
A dyer's daughter with no formal schooling who counselled popes, worked for peace in Italy and became a Doctor of the Church.
C
Saint Cecilia
Feast day: 22 November
One of the most venerated martyrs of the Roman Church, whose legend of singing to God in her heart on her wedding day made her the patroness of sacred music.
C
Saint Clare of Assisi
Feast day: 11 August
The noblewoman of Assisi who fled her family on Palm Sunday night to follow Francis in radical poverty and founded the contemplative Poor Clares.
D
Saint Damien of Molokai
Feast day: 10 May
A Belgian missionary priest who volunteered to live among the exiled lepers of Molokai, rebuilt their community in dignity, contracted the disease himself and died among them.
D
Saint Dominic de Guzmán
Feast day: 8 August
The Castilian canon who answered heresy with learned, poor and joyful preaching, founding the Order of Preachers and spreading the Rosary.
D
Saint Dominic Savio
Feast day: 6 May
A Piedmontese boy formed by Saint John Bosco at the Oratory of Turin, who died at fourteen and became the youngest non-martyr canonized saint.
E
Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton
Feast day: 4 January
Wife, mother of five, widow and convert from the Episcopal Church, who founded the first American community of religious sisters and the first free Catholic school for girls in the United States.
F
Saint Faustina Kowalska
Feast day: 5 October
A Polish religious sister of little schooling to whom Christ entrusted the message of Divine Mercy, the image 'Jesus, I trust in You', the chaplet and the feast of Mercy Sunday.
F
Saint Francis of Assisi
Feast day: 4 October
A wealthy merchant's son who renounced everything to live the Gospel in radical poverty, founding an order that renewed the medieval Church.
F
Saint Francis Xavier
Feast day: 3 December
A Basque nobleman won for Christ by Ignatius of Loyola who baptised tens of thousands in India, the Moluccas and Japan and died in sight of China.
G
Saint George
Feast day: 23 April
A Roman officer martyred under Diocletian for refusing to sacrifice to idols, venerated East and West as the model of the Christian soldier.
G
Saint Gianna Beretta Molla
Feast day: 28 April
An Italian paediatrician, wife and mother of four who, facing a tumour during pregnancy, refused treatment that would have ended her child's life and died a week after giving birth.
G
Saint Gregory the Great
Feast day: 3 September
Roman prefect turned monk and then pope, Gregory fed a starving city, negotiated with the Lombards, reformed the liturgy and chant that bear his name, and sent Augustine of Canterbury to convert the English.
I
Saint Ignatius of Loyola
Feast day: 31 July
A soldier wounded at Pamplona who converted while convalescing and founded the Jesuits, giving the Church the Spiritual Exercises.
J
Saint James the Greater
Feast day: 25 July
One of the three apostles closest to Jesus, first of the Twelve to be martyred, and, through the shrine of Compostela, the patron of Christian pilgrimage in the West.
J
Saint Jerome
Feast day: 30 September
The fiercest and most learned of the Latin Fathers, who left Rome for a cave in Bethlehem and translated the whole Bible from Hebrew and Greek into the Latin Vulgate that the West read for sixteen centuries.
J
Saint Joan of Arc
Feast day: 30 May
A peasant girl who, guided by voices she attributed to Saints Michael, Catherine and Margaret, lifted the siege of Orléans and was burned as a heretic at nineteen, later declared innocent and canonized.
J
Saint John Fisher
Feast day: 22 June
Bishop of Rochester, Chancellor of Cambridge and the only English bishop to refuse Henry VIII's supremacy, beheaded weeks after being made cardinal.
J
Saint John of the Cross
Feast day: 14 December
Carmelite friar, poet and Doctor of the Church who mapped the soul's journey through the dark night to union with God.
J
Saint John Paul II
Feast day: 22 October
Karol Wojtyła, the Polish pope of twenty-seven years who defended human dignity against totalitarianism, travelled to 129 countries and taught the Church a theology of the body and of divine mercy.
J
Saint John the Apostle
Feast day: 27 December
The disciple who leaned on the Lord's breast at the Last Supper, stood beneath the Cross and received Mary as his mother, and wrote the Fourth Gospel.
J
Saint José Sánchez del Río
Feast day: 10 February
A fourteen-year-old Mexican boy tortured and shot in 1928 for refusing to deny Christ, who died crying out 'Viva Cristo Rey!'
J
Saint Joseph
Feast day: 19 March
The just man chosen to be the husband of Mary and the foster father of Jesus, a silent model of faith, obedience and hidden labour.
J
Saint Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin
Feast day: 9 December
A Nahua layman of Tepeyac to whom the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared in December 1531, leaving her image on his tilma and opening the evangelisation of the Americas.
L
Saint Lawrence
Feast day: 10 August
One of the seven deacons of Rome, martyred in 258 for presenting the poor to the prefect as 'the treasures of the Church'.
L
Saint Luke
Feast day: 18 October
A Greek physician and companion of Saint Paul who wrote the Gospel of mercy and the Acts of the Apostles, preserving the infancy narratives and the Magnificat.
M
Saint Marianne Cope
Feast day: 23 January
A German-American Franciscan sister and hospital founder who answered Hawaii's call for help with leprosy when fifty other congregations refused, and cared for Saint Damien and the exiles of Molokai for thirty years.
M
Saint Mark
Feast day: 25 April
Companion of Peter and Paul who wrote the shortest and earliest Gospel and, by tradition, brought the faith to Alexandria where he died a martyr.
M
Saint Martin de Porres
Feast day: 3 November
The mulatto son of a Spanish nobleman and a freed African woman who became a Dominican lay brother in Lima, healer of the poor and patron of interracial justice.
M
Saint Mary Magdalene
Feast day: 22 July
The disciple freed from seven demons who stood at the Cross and was the first witness of the Resurrection, sent by Christ to announce it to the apostles.
M
Saint Matthew
Feast day: 21 September
A tax collector at Capernaum who rose from his customs post at a single word of Christ and wrote the Gospel that presents Jesus as the promised Messiah of Israel.
M
Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe
Feast day: 14 August
Polish Franciscan publisher and missionary who offered his life in place of a father condemned to die of starvation at Auschwitz.
M
Saint Monica
Feast day: 27 August
The persevering mother whose seventeen years of prayer obtained the conversion of her son Augustine.
N
Saint Nicholas of Myra
Feast day: 6 December
The fourth-century bishop of Myra whose secret gifts to three dowerless girls made him the most widely venerated saint of the East and the origin of the figure of Santa Claus.
P
Saint Patrick
Feast day: 17 March
A Romano-British youth carried off as a slave to Ireland who escaped, became a bishop, and returned to evangelise the island that had enslaved him, leaving in his Confessio one of the earliest autobiographies of Western Christianity.
P
Saint Paul the Apostle
Feast day: 29 June
A persecutor of Christians struck down on the road to Damascus, who became the greatest missionary of the apostolic age and author of thirteen New Testament letters.
P
Saint Peter the Apostle
Feast day: 29 June
The fisherman Jesus renamed Peter — the rock — who denied his Lord, was forgiven, led the apostles, and was martyred in Rome.
P
Saint Philip Neri
Feast day: 26 May
The joyful Florentine priest who evangelised Renaissance Rome through friendship, laughter, music and confession, and founded the Congregation of the Oratory.
P
Saint Pier Giorgio Frassati
Feast day: 4 July
A Turin engineering student, mountaineer and lay Dominican who hid a life of daily Eucharist and secret service of the poor behind an exuberant friendship, and died of poliomyelitis at twenty-four.
P
Saint Pio of Pietrelcina
Feast day: 23 September
A Capuchin priest who bore the visible stigmata for fifty years, spent his life in the confessional, and founded a great hospital for the suffering.
R
Saint Rita of Cascia
Feast day: 22 May
Wife, mother, widow and Augustinian nun, who forgave her husband's murderers, ended a family feud and bore a wound of the crown of thorns for fifteen years.
R
Saint Rose of Lima
Feast day: 23 August
Isabel Flores de Oliva, called Rose, lived a hidden life of prayer, penance and care of the sick poor in a garden hut in colonial Lima, and became the first canonized saint of the New World.
S
Saint Sebastian
Feast day: 20 January
An officer of the imperial guard who secretly strengthened Christians awaiting martyrdom; shot with arrows, nursed back to health, he confronted the emperor again and was clubbed to death.
S
Saint Stephen the First Martyr
Feast day: 26 December
The first of the seven deacons and the first Christian martyr, stoned in Jerusalem while praying for his killers, with Saul of Tarsus consenting.
T
Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)
Feast day: 9 August
Jewish philosopher, assistant to Husserl and pioneer of Catholic feminism, who became a Carmelite nun and was murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz as a Jew and a Christian.
T
Saint Teresa of Ávila
Feast day: 15 October
A Spanish Carmelite reformer and mystical writer who mapped the interior life and, with Saint John of the Cross, renewed her order.
T
Saint Teresa of Calcutta
Feast day: 5 September
Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, the Loreto sister who left her convent to serve 'the poorest of the poor' in the streets of Calcutta and founded a congregation now present in more than 130 countries.
T
Saint Thérèse of Lisieux
Feast day: 1 October
A hidden Carmelite nun who died at twenty-four and taught the 'little way' of confidence and love — now a Doctor of the Church and patroness of the missions.
T
Saint Thomas Aquinas
Feast day: 28 January
The greatest theologian of the Middle Ages, author of the Summa Theologiae, who showed that faith and reason cannot contradict each other.
T
Saint Thomas More
Feast day: 22 June
Humanist, lawyer, author of Utopia, husband and father, Lord Chancellor of England, beheaded for refusing to accept Henry VIII's claim to headship of the Church — 'the king's good servant, but God's first'.
T
Saint Thomas the Apostle
Feast day: 3 July
The apostle who refused to believe without seeing and then made the greatest confession of faith in the Gospels, 'My Lord and my God'; ancient tradition sends him to evangelise India, where a Christian community bears his name to this day.
V
Saint Vincent de Paul
Feast day: 27 September
A peasant's son who became the organiser of French charity, founding the Vincentians, co-founding the Daughters of Charity with Louise de Marillac, and reforming the training of priests.