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.
Browse the encyclopedia
13 results
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.