What is a Saint?
In the Catholic Church, the saints are ordinary people like you and me who made it to heaven. They’ve done nothing that you and I cannot do, if we persevere in following Jesus Christ and living our lives according to His teaching.
Catholic devotion to the saints is nothing more than respect and admiration for the memory of the deceased heroes of the Church. We honor them as men and women of heroic virtue who can serve as our role models. They were no more perfect than are we; but, at the end of their lives – and hopefully, ours – they received from Our Lord his words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
We also ask the saints to intercede for us. Have you ever asked anyone to pray for you when you were having a hard time? That is how Catholics “pray to” the saints – we pray with saints, not to them. As the Letter of James says, “The fervent prayer of a righteous person is very powerful.”
Well-known saints like those below often are remembered in a special way on particular days during the year.
January – February – March – April – May – June
July – August – September – October – November – December
This Weeks Saints
October 19
Sts. Isaac Jogues and John de Brebeuf
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29th Sunday in Ordinary Time
October 20
St. Paul of the Cross
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October 21
Bl. Karl of Austria
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October 22
St. John Paul II
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October 23
St John of Capistrano
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October 24
St. Anthony Mary Claret
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October 25
Six Welsh Martyrs
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October 22
Pope St. John Paul II
Born in Wadowice, Poland, in 1920 Karol Jozef Wojtyla felt his call to the priesthood early in life. He attended the University of Krakow, but when it was closed by the Nazis in 1939, he became a laborer in a stone quarry. In 1942, he shifted his education to secretly preparing for the priesthood. He studied theology in Rome after the war, and returned to Poland as a teacher. Communist officials, judging him a harmless intellectual, permitted his elevation as a bishop. Always an outdoorsman, he learned of this while kayaking!
He was Elected as pope, and was invested on October 22, 1978; at 58, the youngest in 150 years, and the first non-Italian in 455 years. John Paul II was the most traveled pope in history, having visited nearly every country in the world which would receive him. As the Vicar of Christ he consecrated each place that he visited to the Blessed Virgin Mary. He was an outspoken opponent of apartheid, abortion, capital punishment, and the Iraq war. He promoted ecumenical and interfaith initiatives. One of the most well-remembered photos of John Paul II’s pontificate was his one-on-one conversation in 1983, with Mehmet Ali Agca, who had attempted to assassinate him two years earlier.
In the last years of his life, he suffered from Parkinson’s disease and osteo arthiritis, finally succumbing in 2005; he died in the Vatican, in accord with his wishes. John Paul II was the second longest-serving pope in modern history after Pope Pius IX.
To be eligible for canonization (being declared a saint) by the Catholic Church, two miracles must be attributed to a candidate. The first miracle attributed to John Paul was the healing of a Columbian man’s Parkinson’s disease; the second, the healing of Costa Rican woman Floribeth Mora of an otherwise terminal brain aneurysm.
“The great danger for family life, in the midst of any society whose idols are pleasure, comfort, and independence, lies in the fact that people close their hearts and become selfish.”
Pope St. John Paul II