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Saint Raymond of Peñafort crossing the sea on his cloak, holding a key, painted by Tommaso Dolabella in 1627

Saint Raymond of Peñafort

Gathered the popes’ scattered decrees into one book of Church law, and refused a see

Patron of
jurists
Western calendar
7 January
Orthodox calendar
Not kept

Raymond was a professor of canon law at Bologna who became a Dominican in 1222 and, with Saint Peter Nolasco, founded the Mercedarians to redeem Christian slaves. Gregory IX gave him the task of gathering the popes' decrees, repeated and contradicted across some twelve or fourteen collections, into one book, and ordered that Raymond's work alone be used in the schools; offered the archbishopric of Tarragona as a reward, Raymond refused it to remain a simple friar. Elected Master General of the Order in 1238, he travelled Europe on foot from one Dominican house to the next, and he died at Barcelona on 6 January 1275.

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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.