Let me preface this by saying that I’m not a Catholic, nor was I raised as one. I went to Catholic school in 6th grade before being expelled at the end of the school year. That’s about the sum of my experience with the subject, and I mean only mild offense to any Catholics who might be reading this. If you ask me, a Catholic sounds like a term for someone addicted to cats, but I digress.
That said, I find the trappings of it all to be interesting, and I especially like the whole concept of patron saints. For nearly every circumstance, there’s someone in the last 2,000 years who’s been selected to represent those involved as a kind of divine advocate if you seek their aid.
For example, St. Jude the Apostle is famously known as the patron saint of lost causes. This is ostensibly because he got confused or even conflated with noted Jesus-betrayer Judas due to their similar names. He wanted to set himself apart via good works or charity by jumping in to help pretty much anyone who’d ask for anything, no matter how ridiculous. So, if you’re a Catholic, you would send a prayer his way before any undertakings where the odds are stacked against you. I’m told he won’t help with playing the lottery or trips to Vegas, though.
My aim in writing this article is to point out some of the more interesting or unusual of Catholicism’s many, many patrons (there are thousands) and describe how they got these jobs. Oh, and as for how one becomes a saint, well, here are the criteria:
1. Be Catholic
Yup, you gotta take the Holy Dip and be baptized into the Catholic Church—no real surprises there. Basic membership counts: you do not have to be a priest or fill any special role in the church, though this does seem to help you get fast-tracked.
2. You Have To Live A Life Of Exemplary Piety
Yes, that’s right. You have to be a fuckin’ model Catholic. You don’t have to have always been one, though. Catholics famously love sinner-to-literal-saint stories, so you can do some really rotten shit before you turn your life into a saintly one.
3. Perform Miracles
This is the hardest of the list for anyone casually wishing to pursue sainthood after reading this article. Miracles are anything benevolent achieved outside of normal human means. Healing the sick, resurrecting the dead in a non-necromantic way, finding the impossibly lost, turning things of little value into things of greater value, and making statues bleed (or cry), are all classic examples of miracles that count. Also, you have to perform two of the fuckers, and have witnesses who’ll tell the church you’re legit.
4. Die
This is the easiest of the list and the most disappointing because you can’t flex your sainthood while still alive. You have to be dead for at least five years before they’ll even consider canonizing you. They do give you bonus points if you’re a martyr for Catholicism, though, so try for that. My guess on starting points would be somewhere in the Middle East, where someone might actually kill you for being Catholic. Or, possibly the Protestant part of Ireland, but I don’t think they do that so much anymore.
Now, let’s watch them go marching in:
No, not Cupertino, California, but rather a small town in what is today southeast Italy. Joseph was known most for his alleged feats of levitating his body during religious ceremonies. So much so that, as a monk, his superiors kept moving him from monastery to monastery, given that crowds would follow him whenever they learned of his whereabouts so as to see the floating friar. He was also mentally retarded. Thus, he is the patron saint of the developmentally handicapped and (presumably due to the levitation) also the patron of air travelers, astronauts, and other aviators.
Twin sister to famous monk and also-Saint, Benedict of Nursia, Scholastica got into god stuff at an early age and went on to live a monastic life. Whereas her brother founded the famous Benedictine Monks, she founded the less-famous Benedictine Nuns. Why they’re still named for Benedict and not Scholastica is anyone’s guess, but my personal hypothesis is that it’s for marketing purposes. So, she’s the patron saint of nuns in general, as well as school, reading, books, and convulsive children for reasons not adequately explained, which is why she makes the list.
Brendan was an Irish monk who had set out on a legendary sea journey, which is just something people did for entertainment back in AD 500. He went off in a boat with some pals to actually go find the fucking Garden of Eden, searching the North Atlantic for it and allegedly bumping into a bunch of islands along the way.
His dubious story goes that he and his buddies pulled up in their boats to a very small island one Easter morn and went to do religious shit and eat breakfast. Once they started a fire, however, they realized they were atop the back of a very large whale. This caused some upset, as their breakfast was ruined, and their island was trying to leave. This is why he is the patron saint of whales. No, not whaling or otherwise dealing with whales. Whales, period. Full stop. Strictly 4 my W.H.A.L.E.Z. Additionally, he’s the patron of carrying canoes over land, so if you ever need portage, he’s got your back there, too.
Fiacre was another Irishman given over to the priesthood and was known in his life for being an exceptional gardener and practitioner of herbal medicine and is the patron of both gardeners and herbalists as a result. This may correlate with his supposed miracles of healing, given that medicine of the age was basically "let’s say some prayers and hope you don’t die," and so anything even slightly more effective than that was seen as the lord’s divine hand. It’s a pretty easy connect-the-dots puzzle.
Speaking of easily connected dots, he also legendarily distrusted and disliked women and is the patron saint of people suffering from sexually transmitted diseases. Hmm, I wonder what happened there? He is also the patron saint of people with hemorrhoids and/or fistulas, which also seems like an easy correlation to make. I bet he didn’t sit down a lot, given the historical lack of Preparation H. He is also claimed to be the patron of taxi drivers, though, curiously, the church does not recognize him as such. Hemorrhoids and STDs, sure, but taxi drivers? That’s just too much for the Vatican.
Drogo began life around AD 1105 and was a child of wealthy parents, having been adopted by a family of Flemish nobles after his mother died giving birth to him and his father some months before. Eventually, his adopted parents told him how his mom died, and like a good Catholic, he immediately felt overwhelmingly guilty about this circumstance well beyond his control.
He gave his inheritance to the poor and wandered around as a penitential pilgrim, owning naught but the clothes on his back. In his early twenties, he developed a "debilitating and disfiguring" hernia. I can’t even imagine what has to happen for a fucking hernia to disfigure you. Either way, his appearance started frightening the townsfolk, so the solution the church had was to build him a tiny cell with only a small window to get food through, making it that nobody could look at him. Thanks, guys. He spent the rest of his life (some 40 more years) without any human contact, except for people asking him for prayers through the little window. He is the patron saint of ugly people, bodily ills, and hernias. Oh, and coffee shop owners, despite living before the prevalence of coffee in Europe. Go figure.
Julian lived during the time of Jesus, around the transition from BC to AD. He actually met the guy or so says scripture, anyhow. Some motherfuckers had wrecked up his house, and so he didn’t want to charitably let anyone else stay there, as he had been doing for pilgrims until Jesus just randomly stopped by and talked some sense into him. And, Jesus spake, saying, "let not these motherfuckers of violence and vandalism wreck your good nature; let people crash here again," and so he did.
Oh, but before all this happened, literally the day before, he killed his own parents in the bedroom. Ostensibly by mistake, having been told by the same motherfucker who wrecked his house that the people sleeping in the bedroom were fucking his wife. What an asshole. So, Julian grabs his gladius and straight merks them in their sleep, only for his wife to tell him after he walks out, "oh, hey, be quiet, your folks stopped in, and they’re asleep in there." Oops. Apparently, the Jeeze didn’t care much about that because Julian was real sorry, so he forgave Julian because that’s his schtick. That’s why Julian is the patron saint of murderers. He’s also the patron saint of clowns in another of those "huh?" moments. Either way, we know who Gacy was prayin’ to.
This one is a bit of a departure because the focus here is not on this saint’s patronage but rather the fact that he was a dog. A greyhound, to be specific. The story goes that a 13th-century French knight, who shall remain nameless, went out hunting and left his infant son in the care of his trusty hound because babysitters are expensive, and fuck ’em.
When this knight returned from the hunt, he found the nursery in chaos with the cot overturned, the child missing, and the dog covered in blood. The knight did what anyone would do if they thought their babysitter murdered their child: he pulled out his sword and decapitated Guinefort. A moment after, he heard the child’s cries and realized he was under the flipped cot, safe and sound, next to the carcass of a viper, which had been slain by the dog. Upon realizing his mistake, he followed knightly logic and chucked the dog’s corpse down a nearby well, covered it with stones, and planted trees around it, making a shrine to the poor creature.
After a little while, the locals began venerating the dead pooch as a protector of infants. This worship persisted throughout the ages, and that led to Guinefort’s patronage as a savior of babies. However, the church frowned on this, and to this very day, nearly a thousand years later, they actively suppress the saintliness of the noble canine, though Guinefort is still prayed to by faithful child-havers and dog-lovers alike.
It should be noted that I have not specified all the patronages of the above-mentioned saints, as your average saint has at least a half-dozen things attributed to them. I’ve only touched on the more unusual ones in their saintly portfolios. If you really want to know more, you can do a web search on any of their names and get that information. I don’t know why they all get so many, given that there are quite literally tens of thousands of canonized saints. You’d think they could specialize a bit, but what do I know?
Have a good Thanksgiving, and try not to get martyred—unless that’s your deal.
Wombstretcha the Magnificent is not even close to being a saint but is a mouthwash connoisseur, ghetto apothecary, writer, and retired rapper from Portland, OR. He can be found at Wombstretcha.com, on Twitter as @Wombstretcha503 and on Facebook (boo!) and MeWe (yay!) as "Wombstretcha The Magniflcent."
