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Saint Josaphat

Western calendar
12 November
Orthodox calendar
Not kept

Josaphat was baptised John and apprenticed to a merchant at Vilna, and in 1604 he entered the Basilian monastery of the Trinity there, taking the name by which he is known. In 1618 he became Archbishop of Polotsk in the Ruthenian Church, which had entered into union with Rome in 1596 while keeping its Byzantine liturgy, and he worked for that union while guarding his people's Eastern traditions. He told his opponents, "I am ready to die for the union of the Church under St. Peter and his successor, the Pope." On 12 November 1623 a mob killed him at Vitebsk, and in 1867 he became the first saint of the Eastern Churches to be canonised in Rome.

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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.