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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 Lazarus

Western calendar
29 July, with Saints Martha and Mary
Orthodox calendar
17 October, the translation of his relics; he is remembered above all on Lazarus Saturday, in the sixth week of Great Lent (30 October on the old calendar)

Lazarus lived at Bethany with his sisters Martha and Mary, and the Lord, who often stayed in their house, called him his friend; when he had lain four days in the grave Jesus called him out of it, and many who came to see him believed. The Orthodox remember that he lived thirty more years as a bishop on Cyprus, where his relics were found in a marble coffin inscribed "Lazarus of the Four-Days, the friend of Christ", while the later Western story that he became Bishop of Marseilles has, in the Catholic Encyclopedia's words, "no solid foundation". Since 2021 the Roman calendar keeps his memorial with his sisters on 29 July.

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.