Christian Pure

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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 Hildegard of Bingen

Western calendar
17 September
Orthodox calendar
Not kept
Honoured as
Doctor of the Church

Hildegard was given to the Benedictine abbey of Disibodenberg at the age of eight, and the visions God sent her from childhood she dictated to the monk Volmar, and in 1147 Pope Eugene III allowed her to write and to speak in public. Besides the Scivias and other books of her visions she wrote on medicine and the natural sciences, composed sacred music, wrote some four hundred letters that survive, to popes and to simple people, and preached in the squares and cathedrals of Cologne and Trier, something unusual for a woman of her time. She died among her sisters at Rupertsberg on 17 September 1179, and in 2012 Benedict XVI proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church.

Sources

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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.