MIRACULOUS MIRACLES™

Patron Saints

The SaintsPrayersThe Calendar

3,176 patronages are recorded across the saints in this catalogue — who has been asked, by long custom or by a formal act, about what. 342 of them are held by more than one saint; the rest belong to exactly one.

If you already know what you are looking for, the site search will find it: every patronage here is indexed, so typing a trouble into the search box returns the saints who carry it. This page is for the other case — when you do not know what to type, and want to see what the Church has been asked about.

Use Search the patron saints at the top of this page.

The most asked

Where the catalogue has the most saints holding one patronage. A crowded entry usually means an old need rather than an important saint. Touch one to see who holds it.

113 patronages

Illness and healing

The largest group in the catalogue by far, and the oldest. Much of it is assigned by resemblance rather than by history: Apollonia's teeth were broken before she died, so she is asked about toothache; Lucy's name means light and her eyes were put out, so she is asked about sight.

and 83 more in this theme — all of them in the site search.

227 patronages

Work and trade

Trades claimed their saints early and kept them: a guild wanted a feast, an altar and a protector, and the choice usually turned on an instrument of martyrdom or an episode in a life. The wool-combers took Blaise because his flesh was torn with their combs.

and 197 more in this theme — all of them in the site search.

194 patronages

Family and the home

Marriage, childbirth, and the states of life that go with them. The Church did not invent most of these; they attached themselves to saints whose own lives had gone the same way, which is why so many of the marriage patrons had difficult ones.

and 164 more in this theme — all of them in the site search.

115 patronages

Danger and disaster

Fire, water, weather and war. These are the patronages people actually invoked in the moment, and the reason so many saints are named against something rather than for it.

and 85 more in this theme — all of them in the site search.

66 patronages

The mind, and what cannot be mended

Despair, addiction, grief, and the cases everyone has given up on. Jude has the hopeless because his name was confused with Judas and nobody else asked him, which is either an accident or the best story in the calendar.

and 36 more in this theme — all of them in the site search.

351 patronages

Vocations and states of life

Who the Church herself asks for. Most of these are official, given by a pope in a formal act, and many are modern: the patron of catechists, of missionaries, of confessors.

and 321 more in this theme — all of them in the site search.

477 patronages

Orders, dioceses and institutions

Not needs at all but belongings: the founders and protectors of orders, the patrons of dioceses and universities. Forty-two saints in this catalogue are patrons of the Diocese of Rome alone.

and 447 more in this theme — all of them in the site search.

121 patronages

Nations and cities

A saint becomes the patron of a place by being born there, dying there, converting it, or saving it from something — and occasionally by a king deciding so. These are detected from the catalogue's own geography rather than from a list.

and 91 more in this theme — all of them in the site search.

What a patron saint is not

“You have to ask the right saint.”

There is no right saint. Patronage is not a jurisdiction and a saint is not a department; you may ask any of them about anything, and most Catholics do. What a patronage records is that a particular saint has been asked about a particular thing for a long time, often for a reason that made sense to the people who started it.

“The saint grants the favour.”

No saint grants anything. Asking a saint to pray for you is what the Church means by intercession, and it is the same act as asking a friend to pray for you, except that the friend is not going to forget. Every answered prayer in this catalogue is answered by God.

“The patronages were carefully assigned.”

Most were not assigned at all. They accumulated — by the manner of a death, by a pun on a name, by what a guild happened to need. Apollonia's teeth were broken, so she has toothache. Lucy's name means light and her eyes were put out, so she has sight. Clare of Assisi, too ill to go to Mass, is said to have seen it on the wall of her cell, and Pius XII made her the patron of television in 1958. Isidore of Seville, who tried to write down everything, is widely called the patron of the internet, and the Church has never actually said so.

“There is an official list.”

There is no complete one. Some patronages are conferred by a formal papal act and are as official as anything gets; most are custom, recorded in martyrologies and local calendars and repeated until they stuck. This page reflects what the catalogue's own profiles say, which is the usual mixture, and it does not tidy the mixture up.

The oldest of these came from people who were frightened and wanted somebody to ask. That is still what they are for.

The PrayersAll the SaintsToday in the Church