Christian Pure

Find a saint

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 Mark the Evangelist

Western calendar
25 April
Orthodox calendar
25 April (8 May on the old calendar)
Patron of
notaries, Venice

Mark is the John Mark of Acts, whose mother's house in Jerusalem was where the brethren were praying on the night Peter came back from prison, and Peter calls him "Mark my son". Papias, writing by the year 130, says that Mark was Peter's interpreter and wrote down Peter's teaching accurately, though not in order, and a wide tradition makes him the founder of the Church of Alexandria. The Orthodox remember that he was dragged through its streets and died saying, "Into Your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit", and since 820 his relics have rested in Venice, and Christian art shows him with a lion.

Sources

Email me this saint

We’ll send this page, with the feast days, so you have it when you need it.

Every saint here, by feast day

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.