Saints’ feast days in April

Made bishop at twenty-seven, he spent fifty-two years reforming a diocese he repeatedly begged to leave for a monastery — every pope refused. He gave Bruno and his six companions the mountain solitude of the Chartreuse, and sold his ring and chalice in famine.

A Calabrian hermit from age fifteen, founder of the Minims — ‘the least’ — vowed to a perpetual Lent without meat, eggs, or milk. Kings could not command him until a pope did: he spent his last twenty-five years reforming the French court, and died there on Good Friday at ninety-one.

An Oxford scholar who plowed his brother’s fields in youth and never lost the touch; as bishop of Chichester — locked out of his own palace by the king for two years — he lived on charity, visited every corner of his diocese on foot, and left a prayer the whole world knows: to see Christ more clearly, love him more dearly, follow him more nearly.

A Roman imperial secretary, friend and correspondent of Augustine — who dedicated the City of God to him — sent to Carthage to judge between Catholics and Donatists. Falsely entangled in a rebellion by his enemies, he was summarily executed; the empire exonerated him too late.

A Picard farm girl, catechist from childhood, paralyzed for twenty-two years and hunted through the Revolution for hiding priests. Cured at fifty-three, when she was asked to take a step for the Sacred Heart and walked, she founded the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur for the education of poor girls, with the conviction that carried her through everything: how good the good God is.

A Frankish noblewoman of a family of saints — parents, husband, sister, and all four children are venerated — who, when her husband entered a monastery, founded her own convent at the place that grew into the city of Mons, whose patroness she remains.

Master of the cathedral school that made Chartres the schoolroom of Europe, and bishop who rebuilt its burned cathedral over the crypt that still bears his work. His students scattered across the continent; his hymns to the Virgin’s nativity are sung yet.

Juanita Fernández of Santiago, a lively, athletic girl who read Thérèse and Elizabeth of the Trinity and burned with the same fire. She entered the Andean Carmel of Los Andes at nineteen and died of typhus eleven months later, professed on her deathbed — Chile’s first saint.

The last pope venerated as a martyr: he condemned the emperor’s compromise on Christ’s two wills without waiting for imperial approval, was seized in the Lateran, tried for treason at Constantinople, mocked, chained, and exiled to the Crimea, where he died of ill-treatment, abandoned even by his own church.

A Provençal soldier-poet converted from a dissolute youth, who gave himself to teaching catechism in the streets and founded the Fathers of Christian Doctrine — convinced that half the era’s ruin came from simple ignorance of the faith, and that patient teaching could mend it.

An English monk, third abbot of the struggling new monastery of Cîteaux, who wrote the Charter of Charity that organized the Cistercian order — and who, when the house seemed dying, received at the gate a young noble named Bernard with thirty companions.

A Roman senator denounced as a Christian under Commodus, who used his trial to deliver a reasoned defense of the faith before the Senate — among the earliest such speeches preserved — and accepted the sentence, loving his life but unafraid of death, since something better awaited him.

Archbishop of Canterbury carried off by Danish raiders, who forbade his impoverished people to ransom him. After seven months, at a drunken feast, his captors pelted him with ox bones and an axe finished him — a martyr, Anselm later ruled, for justice as truly as for the faith.

A Tuscan girl who entered religious life at nine and was made abbess at fifteen by papal dispensation; she founded a Dominican convent in her home town, which she governed with visions, austerities, and practical charity until her death. Catherine of Siena venerated her body a generation later.

Son of an innkeeper on the Anatolian high road, a boy-ascetic who became the wonder-worker of his province — healing, reconciling villages, blessing crops — and briefly, unwillingly, a bishop. Emperors sought his blessing; he preferred his iron cage on the hillside.

A Swabian lawyer called ‘the advocate of the poor’ who burned his briefs, became a Capuchin, and was sent to preach to the Calvinists of the Grisons. Warned of his death, he preached anyway; a band of armed men cut him down on the road. He is protomartyr of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.

Third bishop of Rome after Peter and Linus, in the generation when apostolic memory was still living voice. Ancient tradition credits him with ordaining priests for the city and honoring the burial place of Peter, near which he was himself laid.

A shepherd boy turned Dominican inquisitor turned pope, who enforced the Council of Trent, published the catechism, breviary, and missal that bore his name for four centuries, and called the alliance whose fleet won at Lepanto — instituting Our Lady of Victory in thanksgiving. He wore his friar’s habit beneath the papal white, beginning a custom that endures.