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Saint Anthony the Great

Western calendar
17 January
Orthodox calendar
17 January (30 January on the old calendar)
Honoured as
Founder of Christian monasticism

Anthony was about twenty, the heir of well-to-do parents in Egypt, when he heard in church the Gospel words "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell all thou hast" and took them as spoken to himself. He gave away his goods, lived alone first in a tomb and then for twenty years in an abandoned fort in the desert, and when his friends cleared the stones from its entrance the disciples who gathered round him grew into families of monks, so that he is called the founder of Christian monasticism. The life that Athanasius wrote says he died at a hundred and five, and on his feast day stalls and domestic animals are still blessed.

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Feast days, two calendars and patron saints

A saint’s feast day is the day each year when the Church remembers that saint in its worship, and for most saints it is the day they died. These are among the oldest days in the Christian year: after Easter and Pentecost, and Christmas and Epiphany in the fourth century, the next feasts the Church kept were those of the apostles and the martyrs.

Many saints have two dates in the finder because the Western and Orthodox Churches built their calendars separately over many centuries. Sometimes they remember the same saint on different days: the West keeps Saint Jude with Saint Simon on 28 October, while the Orthodox keep him on 19 June. Some Orthodox churches, such as the Russian Church, also still follow the old Julian calendar, which now runs thirteen days behind the one on our walls, so their 6 December falls on our 19 December. Where that happens the finder gives both dates.

A patron saint is a saint the Church has come to ask for help in a particular place, work or need, “a special intercessor with God and the proper advocate”, as the old Catholic Encyclopedia puts it. Some patronages were declared by a pope, as when Pius IX named Saint Joseph patron of the whole Church in 1870; most grew from long tradition, as with Saint Anthony and the things we lose.

We chose these two hundred saints by what people search for most, by name, by need and by date, and added the saints Orthodox Christians look for and the apostles. Every fact in an entry comes from a source we checked and name under it: the Catholic Encyclopedia, the Orthodox Church in America’s lives of the saints, Vatican News and the Holy See’s own documents. Where a saint’s story comes to us mostly from legend, the entry says so.