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Saint John Fisher

Western calendar
22 June, with Saint Thomas More
Orthodox calendar
Not kept

John Fisher became Chancellor of Cambridge University and in 1504 Bishop of Rochester, and under his guidance Lady Margaret Beaufort founded St John's and Christ's Colleges there. When Henry VIII sought to be rid of Queen Catherine, Fisher became her chief counsellor and told the legates' court that, like Saint John the Baptist, he was ready to die for the indissolubility of marriage. He refused the oath of succession and was sent to the Tower in 1534, and when the pope made him a cardinal the king said he would send the head to Rome instead of the hat. He was beheaded on Tower Hill on 22 June 1535 for denying that the king was supreme head of the Church.

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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 the first 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. Then we added a saint for each of the 138 days that still had none, so every day of the year now has at least one, and forty more of the saints people search for: 378 entries in all. 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.