St. Direwolf

St. Guinefort   Feast Day August 22

He was French greyhound,  traveling companion and sometime nurse to St. Roch (1295-1327). Roch, infected by the plague and with a hideous sore on his leg, went into the forest to die.  But there, St. Guinefort visited him daily, licking his wound, bringing him bread snatched from his master’s table and just keeping him alive.  The loyal pooch accompanied Roch on his journey back home staying with the saint until his passing.  Guinefort, still attractive and noble-looking, was adopted by a rich family who entrusted him with guarding their infant. He took this job seriously, once even chewing a lurking serpent to pieces, an attack that left a lot of blood.  When the baby’s father saw the gore, he assumed Guinfort had slaughtered the baby and promptly killed the holy dog with his sword.  A few minutes later, the father heard his healthy baby gurgling and cooing, saw serpent bits around the cradle and realized his horrifying blunder. He build an elaborate grave for St. Guinfort where peasants, making offerings of salt,  would bring the children to be healed.

Nedd…we still remember you!

St. John the Baptist, Patron of road workers, health spas, wool & leather workers, Jordan; Invoked to protect lambs

Most saints are commemorated on the anniversaries of their death—their “Heavenly Birthdays.” But on June 24—Midsummer Day—we celebrate the earthly birth of John the Baptist. After this date the days grow shorter, and the end of the Christian year approaches, until in early winter we celebrate the birth of Christ, and a new Beginning. John is a figure of great importance in the New Testament. All four Evangelists are at pains to praise this contemporary of Christ (according to Luke, he was Our Lord’s cousin). Perhaps this Holy Man of the Desert—preacher, prophet, baptizer—was briefly Christ’s rival for the title of Messiah; at any rate, the authors of the Gospels describe John as humbly deferring to their Hero. John, like many an Old Testament prophet before him, had harsh words for the morals of reigning Jewish royalty. King Herod had him arrested, imprisoned, and so the story goes, decapitated—his severed head being awarded to a striptease dancer named Salome. As Patron of Midsummer, John absorbed all the pagan magic associated with that day (and the eve of that day). The bonfires lit to honor the old gods became “the fires of Saint John.” The miraculous curative herb Hypericum traditionally gathered at that time became Saint-John’s-Wort—”High John the Conkeroo” to voodoo practitioners. Because he vowed to “make straight the way,” he is the Patron of highways and road workers; because he called Christ “the Lamb of God,” and is invariable pictured with a lamb, he looks after all those engaged in the wool-working trades. He was always clad in camel’s hide, endearing him to leather workers, and having immersed sinners in the waters of Jordan, he is the Patron of all health spas and of that Middle Eastern nation.

Dorothy Day    May Day

“Dorothy Day did for her era what Francis of Assisi did for his: recall a complacent Christianity to its radical roots.” In her younger days Dorothy was a suffragette, a Communist, a journalist and  free love advocate. She had a series of lovers (including Eugene O’Neill), a divorce, an abortion and once attempted suicide. Dorothy became interested in Catholicism while pregnant with her daughter and after her conversion,  left her lover to raise her daughter alone. Because the Catholic Church had brought her to Christ, she put aside her reservations about its bureaucracy and bilious priests—”One must always live i na state of permanent dissatisfaction with the Church.” She and her fellow pacifist Peter Maurin founded The Catholic Worker for the poor and disenfranchised of society.  Dorothy built and lived in a “hospitality house” in the slums of New York, which she established to feed and shelter the homeless.   She died penniless, and Abbie Hoffman, Cesar Chavez, and Daniel Berrigan attended her funeral.  When Dorothy’s expensive canonization process began in March 2000, Father Berrigan, calling her the people’s saint, suggested the money be given to the poor instead.  She might have agreed: when a reporter, in light of her status as a living Saint, asked if she had holy visions, Dorothy’s response was an irritated, “Oh shit!”

St. Peter Chanel   Patron of Oceania

Under the patronage of his parish priest, Peter, a poor French shepherd boy, received a classical education before joining the missionary Priests of the Society of Mary, the Marists.  in 1836, Pope Gregory XVI sent him as the True Faith’s first ambassador to the South Pacific.  Peter landed on the tiny island of Futuna in the New Hebrides, where for three years he made little headway among the local cannibals, until he managed to convert and baptize the son of the chief.  That tattooed pagan dignitary lost not time in sending a band of warriors armed with clubs and spears to take care of Father Chanel.  Our Saint’s dying words to them, which he spoke in the local lingo, were “It is well for me that you do this thing>”  Suitably impressed, his killers—and indeed the entire population of the island—immediately became devout Roman Catholics.

St. Armel    Invoked against gout and rheumatism      Armel was famous as a dragon-tamer and miracle-worker in Brittany which is why many French hospitals are named after him.  In 1485 (933 years after Armel’s death), Henry Tudor (soon to be King Henry VII) launched an invasion of England from Brittany, and claimed to be saved from shipwreck through this Saint’s Divine intersession.

St. George   Patron of England, Knights, Archers; Invoked against Plague, Leprosy, Syphilis

George was a Palestinian soldier martyred during the persecution of Diocletian; his cult flourished not only in the Middle Easts but in England during the Crusades—it was probably the Crusaders who brought it with them from Palestine.  King Edward III made George Patron of England and Henry V invoked him a the Battle of Agincourt.  The story of George and the dragon—the triumph of good over evil—varies.   In the classic version, George, young and handsome confronts the dragon-with-poisonous-breath who is holding a princess captive. (She drew a short straw in the town lottery and/or was perishing in a castle from lack of water.)  George pierced  the dragon with his lance, led it captive through town in the princess’s girdle, and instantly converts 15,000 people.  In the East, George is depicted as a quasi-god who endures a series of tortures, including running in red-hot shoes, but always miraculously recovers the next day.  In the Western version, George is a prince of Cappadocia who is tortured daily for seven years and whose bravery is so great that he converts 40,900 people, including the Empress Alexandria.  An ignoble George does exist, however: in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, which portrays him as a brigand dealing in black-market bacon and rising to power as a Primate of Egypt.  This George was arrested and thrown into the sea.  In art, George is depicted dressed in armor, carrying a banner with a red cross, and slaying the dragon.  The British flag, the Union Jack, includes a variation of the red cross of Saint George.  “Riding Saint George”—that is, sexual intercourse with the female on top—was long believed to be the certain method of begetting a bishop.

St Philip   Patron of Luxembourg and Uruguay

A Galilean fisherman, married and the father of three, Philip gave up everything to follow Christ.  He became the third Apostle.  He helped serve the miraculously multiplied loaves and fishes to the multitudes, for which reason a basket of bread is among his emblems.  after Pentecost, he travel to Phrygia, where the Devil, in the form of a hideous dragon, guarded a statue of Mars.  Philip performed a public exorcism, in the course of which the fiery breath of the loathsome beast slew several spectators, among them the son of the local pagan priest, who forthwith ordered Our Saint stoned and crucified upside down.

St. Margaret  Patron of Childbirth, Nurses and Peasants

A princess of Antioch, Margaret was thrown out of the house when her father discovered that her nanny (one Theotimus) had made her a Christian; together the maiden and her maid became simple shepherdesses.  A stunning beauty despite having consecrated herself to virginity, Margaret was pursued by an amorous prefect, who, upon her rejection of his advances, threw her into jail.  There, in her cell, she was visited by Satan, who assumed the form of a dragon and swallowed her. But in the very belly of the beast, a cross she carried grew to such enormous proportions that the dragon was split in two, and Margaret emerged unharmed.  For  this reason she is the traditional Patron of Childbirth.  She was eventually beheaded, and went directly to Heaven, where she enjoyed enormous popularity through the Middle Ages. Heres was one of the voices heard by Joan of Arc.  Among her emblems is a pearl—which is “margarita” in Latin.

St Domitian  Invoked Against Fever

Upon Domitian’s appointment as bishop, he immediately banished the loathsome dragon that had been poisoning the local water supply. His popularity increased when, in a time of famine, he successfully predicted a bumper crop, thereby convincing the rich to distribute the grain they had been hoarding.

John the Dwarf

One of the Desert Fathers, hermits who in the fourth and fifth centuries fled the world to live in absolute poverty, humility, and prayer in the rocky wilderness of Skete, Egypt, John the Dwarf seems to have been somewhat impetuous, for a monk. One day, while working, he suddenly resolved to become and Angel, tore off his garments, and ran out into the desert.  He returned in a week, hungry and thirsty.  He was gently mocked for his pride by his brothers( “Are you not an Angel?”), until he apologized.  He died on Mount Quolzum, having been driven away from his cell at Skete by marauding Berbers.