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Saint Brigid of Kildare

Western calendar
1 February
Orthodox calendar
1 February, kept by the Orthodox Church in America
Patron of
Ireland, students

Brigid was born at Faughart in County Louth in the middle of the fifth century, and as a girl she gave away so much of her father's goods to the poor that, the story goes, he tried to sell her to the king, who watched her hand a beggar the sword he had given her father. She became a nun and founded Cill-Dara, “the church of the oak”, which grew into Kildare with its school of art and a scriptorium whose book of the Gospels Giraldus Cambrensis thought “the work of angelic, and not human skill”. Ireland keeps her as its patroness, and families there still make Saint Brigid's crosses of rushes and hang them in their homes.

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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.