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.
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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 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.
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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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.
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 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'.
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.