What is a Saint?
In the Catholic Church, the saints are ordinary people like you and I 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
August 30
St. Jeanne Jugan
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Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
August 31
St. Raymond Nonnatus
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September 1
St. Giles
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World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation
September 2
St Agricola of Avignon
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September 3
Pope St. Gregory the Great
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September 4
Bl Dina Bélanger
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St Teresa of Calcutta
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August 29
St. Jeanne Jugan
“Be kind, especially with the infirm. Love them well … Oh yes! Be kind. It is a great grace God is giving you. In serving the aged, it is he himself whom you are serving.”
St. Jeanne Jugan
Jeanne Jugan was born in Brittany, the sixth of eight children. Her father, a poor Breton fisherman, was lost at sea when she was four. Her mother took odd jobs to keep her children fed. Because of the persecutions that occurred during the French Revolution, she taught them the faith secretly.
Jeanne grew up working as a shepherdess and a maid. She took a job as a kitchen maid in the home of a devout Catholic, the Viscountess de la Choue, who took Jeanne with her when she visited the poor. Twice a young man proposed marriage, but she declined his offers, telling her mother, “God wants me for himself. He is keeping me for a work which is not yet founded.” She took jobs as a nurse, servant, and companion.
At forty-seven, Jeanne was living in an apartment with two other women. In the winter of 1839, she found Anne Chauvin, an old blind woman, on her step. She tucked the woman into her own bed and slept in the attic. From this time, the elderly poor became the center of her concern. Within two years, she had found the means to begin a twelve bed shelter and hospital for them; a year later, she found an unused building which she used to accommodate forty elderly in need. People called her and the women who joined her the “Little Sisters of the Poor.” Jeanne became “Mary of the Cross.”
Within a few years, a priest who was helping Jeanne lead the new community inexplicably removed her from her post and sent her to beg for the sisters. A few years after that, Jeanne was told to retire to the motherhouse, where she dwelt for twenty-seven years in obscurity. Although the younger sisters did not know she was their foundress, she taught them, nevertheless: “The poor are our Lord.” Jeanne died at eighty-six. Today her sisters serve in thirty-one countries. She was canonized in 2009.
September 5
St. Teresa of Calcutta
We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.
Mother Teresa
Gonxha Agnes Bojaxhiu was born to Albanian parents, Nikola and Drane Bojaxhiu, in Skopje, Macedonia on August 26, 1910. She celebrated her First Communion at the age of 5 and was confirmed a year later; shortly after, her father died. She was very involved in the life of her parish, and in high school, she joined a Catholic sodality and showed a strong interest in foreign missions. At age 18, she left her home and joined the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Dublin, known as the Loreto Sisters of Dublin. She received the name Sister Mary Teresa after St. Therese of Lisieux.
In 1929, she left her home and traveled to the Loreto Entally community in Calcutta, and taught at St. Mary’s School for girls, where she taught for years, eventually becoming the school’s principal. On September 10, 1946 while traveling to her annual retreat in Darjeeling, she had a mystical experience in which she was called to “follow Christ into the slums to serve him among the poorest of the poor.” From that moment, service to the poor the became the driving force of her life.
After two years she received permission to leave her order. She took a nursing course and returned to Calcutta, India to begin her mission. On December 21, she went for the first time to the slums. She visited families, washed the sores of some children, cared for an old man lying sick on the road and nursed a woman dying of hunger and tuberculosis. She started each day with communion then went out, rosary in her hand, to find and serve Jesus in the poor of Calcutta. Gathering volunteers around her, she formed the Missionaries of Charity on October 7, 1950. For the next 40 years, until her death in 1997, she served the poorest of her neighbors through hostels for the dying, caring for lepers, and tending orphans, the abandoned, and the elderly poor; for the unwanted, the unloved, and the uncared for.