Find a saint

Type a first name, a need or a date. You get the saint at once, with their feast days in the Western and Orthodox calendars and the sources we checked.

Saint Andrew the Apostle

Western calendar
30 November
Orthodox calendar
30 November (13 December on the old calendar)
Patron of
Scotland, Russia, Romania, Ukraine, fishermen

Andrew was a fisherman of Bethsaida and a disciple of John the Baptist, and when John pointed to Jesus as the Lamb of God he followed him, then hurried to his brother Simon with the news, "We have found the Messiah." The Orthodox call him the First-Called, and in the Gospel it is Andrew who finds the boy with "five barley loaves and two fishes". Tradition sends him preaching along the Black Sea and in Greece, and holds that he was crucified at Patras, bound to the cross rather than nailed. Scotland and Russia honour him as their chief patron, and Romania and Ukraine as theirs.

Sources

Email me this saint

We’ll send this page, with the feast days, so you have it when you need it.

Every saint here, by feast day

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.