My mom was an extremely devout Roman Catholic, and I still recall her instructing me to "pray to St. Jude" when I was worried about a bad outcome.
At some point I thought to ask her, "Why St. Jude?"
"Because he's the patron saint of lost causes," she explained.
I pondered on that for a moment. "If he's in charge of lost causes," I finally said, "wouldn't he be the worst person to pray to? Shouldn't I be asking for help from someone with a better track record?"
My mom, who had many fine qualities but was born without a sense of humor, didn't appreciate my attempt at levity. She took her saints seriously.
St. Jude is hardly the only Catholic saint whose story is a little on the odd side. Consider, for example, St. Rita of Cascia, who lived in the fifteenth century in Perugia, Italy. Rita at first seemed like she was destined to live a completely ordinary life. She was the daughter of a moderately wealthy couple in the town of Roccaporena, and upon reaching marrying age was wedded to a nobleman named Paolo di Ferdinando di Mancino. Mancino turned out to be a nasty piece of work, and was verbally and physically abusive to poor Rita, but by her "humility, kindness, and faith" she was able to convert him to better behavior. They had two sons, Giangiacomo Antonio and Paulo Maria, and everything was going on swimmingly until a guy named Guido Chiqui, who belonged to a rival family, stabbed Mancino to death.
Well, Rita was understandably upset, especially after all the effort she'd put in to turn her husband into a nice guy, and she was even more chagrined to find out her two sons were planning on taking revenge and murdering Chiqui, so she prayed that they be spared from doing something that would land them both in hell forever. God obliged by making them both die of dysentery.
So be careful what you pray for, I guess.
Rita, now husbandless and childless, decided to join a convent, where she died in 1457. She's now the patron saint of abused people.
Then there's St. Lidwina of Schiedam, a fourteenth-century Dutch woman who was injured while ice skating at age fifteen, and afterward supposedly didn't need to eat anything. Despite this -- and the alarming and bizarre claim that she "shed skin, bones, and parts of her intestines, which her parents kept in a vase and which gave off a sweet odor" -- she lived another thirty-seven years, and upon canonization became the patron saint of chronic illnesses... and ice skaters.
Seems like if I was an ice skater, I'd want to pray to someone who hadn't nearly died doing it, but that's just me.
Then there's the third-century St. Denis, who was a Christian bishop among the Parisii, a Gaulish tribe who lived along the banks of the River Seine (and for whom Paris is named). St. Denis went around preaching, and apparently was so well-spoken that he converted a lot of local pagans, which pissed off the local authorities. They appealed to the Roman Emperor Decius, who gave the order to arrest Denis and his friends Rusticus and Eleutherius. After a stint in prison, all three were beheaded with a sword on the highest hill in the area -- what is now called Montmartre.
So far, nothing too odd. But after Denis was beheaded, his body stood up, picked up his own head, and walked three miles with it, his head preaching a sermon the whole way. At some point evidently even holiness couldn't propel him any further and he collapsed and died (again) -- on the site where the Basilica of St. Denis currently stands. But this is why many images of St. Denis are shown with him holding his own head:
Besides being the patron saint of both Paris and France as a whole, guess what else St. Denis is the patron saint of?
Headaches.
Another third-century saint who is mostly famous for how he died is St. Lawrence, who came from the town of Huesca in Spain. He preached all over southern Europe but got himself in trouble when he was in Rome in 258 C.E. by recommending redistribution of wealth to the poor. (If you can imagine.) The powers that be decided Lawrence needed to go, and they came up with a nasty way to do it -- they chained him to a grill and roasted him over an open fire. Lawrence, defiant to the end, yelled at his executioners, "You can turn me over, I'm done on this side!" And this is why he's the patron saint of cooks... and comedians.
But the weirdest claim I've seen along these lines is an obscure seventh-century British saint, St. Rumbold of Buckingham. Rumbold was supposedly the grandson of King Penda of Mercia, who was a prominent pagan, but his parents (names unknown) converted to Christianity. Rumbold was born in 662 C.E. and only lived three days -- but was born able to talk. His first words were allegedly "Christianus sum, Christianus sum, Christianus sum!" ("I'm a Christian, I'm a Christian, I'm a Christian!"), which even if you're devout must have been creepy as hell. Afterward Rumbold politely requested baptism, and preached several sermons before expiring.
There are several places named after him, including St. Rumbold's Well in Buckingham:
The best part of the whole story, though, is that Boxley Abbey in Kent had a famous statue of St. Rumbold, that was small and light (because, of course, he was a baby), but sometimes inexplicably would become so heavy no one could lift it. The deal was, the monks said, that only someone who was holy and pure of heart could lift the statue. Well, when the Dissolution of the Monasteries happened during the sixteenth century, and Boxley Abbey was abandoned and largely torn down, it was discovered that the statue was fixed to its heavy stone base by a wooden pin that could be released by a person standing unseen behind the alcove. So, basically, one of the monks would check out whoever was trying to lift the statue, and decide if they were holy enough to pull the pin for.
Sometimes even Miracles of God need a little human assistance, apparently.
Anyhow, that's our cavalcade of holiness for the day. Unsurprisingly, I think the whole thing is kind of weird. I feel bad for the saints who got martyred -- no one deserves that -- and even for poor St. Rita with her life-long run of bad luck. I don't think I'll be praying to any of them, though, however much our country could use some help from St. Jude at the moment.
Or even from talking babies and guys walking around carrying their own severed heads.
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