Saints’ feast days in February

Niece of Montaigne, widowed mother of four in Huguenot Bordeaux, who at fifty-five founded the Company of Mary Our Lady — the first religious order of women dedicated to teaching girls, patterned on the Jesuits. Deposed by an intriguer in her own order, she bore it in silence and was vindicated.

A Portuguese courtier turned Jesuit missionary who lived as an Indian ascetic in Madurai — saffron robe, sandals, vegetarian diet — to preach Christ within the culture. Banished once, he returned knowing the cost, and was beheaded. The king he had converted kept the faith.

A carpenter’s orphan of Picardy who lived walled in a hermit’s cell until visions of Francis of Assisi sent her out — barefoot, at twenty-five — to reform the Poor Clares. She founded or renewed seventeen convents, counseled princes during the Great Schism, and never lost her gentleness.

A Frankish courtier who left Charlemagne’s service for the cloister and became the second father of Benedictine life, reforming the empire’s monasteries under one observance and compiling every monastic rule known to him into a single great codex.

Patriarch of Antioch three times exiled by Arian emperors, who baptized and ordained John Chrysostom, opened the Council of Constantinople, and died presiding over it — mourned by the whole assembly as a father of the Nicene faith.

A Dominican prioress of Prato who for twelve years relived the Passion in weekly ecstasies she begged God to make less public, corresponded with three future saints, and governed her convent with such practical wisdom that half of Tuscany sought her counsel.

The Jesuit sent to Paray-le-Monial who discerned, alone, that Margaret Mary’s visions of the Sacred Heart were true — Christ had promised her that a faithful servant and perfect friend would come. Chaplain in Protestant England, he was imprisoned in the Titus Oates panic and died of it at forty-one.

The runaway slave converted by Paul in prison and sent back to his master with the letter to Philemon, which asks that he be received no longer as a servant but as a most beloved brother. Ancient tradition makes him afterward a bishop and a martyr under Domitian: the Gospel’s answer to slavery in one life.

Seven cloth merchants of Florence who left their prospering trade in 1233 for a life of common prayer on Monte Senario, devoted to the Sorrows of Mary. From their hillside came the Servants of Mary; the Church canonized all seven together, as they had lived.

Patriarch of Constantinople who condemned the heresy that dissolved Christ’s humanity, was deposed by the ‘Robber Council’ of Ephesus and beaten so badly he died within days. Leo’s Tome, written to him, vindicated his faith at Chalcedon two years later.

A young nobleman whose hunting fire destroyed a countryside; when a poor man was condemned for it, Conrad confessed, paid with his whole fortune, and took the lesson to heart — spending his remaining forty years as a penitent hermit in Sicily, famous for peace and healings.

The two youngest seers of Fatima, seven and nine when the Virgin appeared in 1917. Francisco gave himself to ‘consoling the hidden Jesus’; Jacinta to sacrifices for sinners. Both died in the influenza epidemic within three years, the youngest non-martyr saints the Church has canonized.

A farmer’s beautiful daughter who lived nine years as a nobleman’s mistress; his murder shattered her. Barefoot, with her son, she did public penance at Cortona, founded a hospital and a company of nurses for the poor, and became — her confessor recorded — a mystic the town called simply ‘the poverella.’

The first Christian king of the English, who received Augustine’s mission courteously — under the open sky, wary of magic — then freely embraced the faith. He built Canterbury’s first cathedral, wrote the earliest English law code, and compelled no man’s conversion.

An English nun summoned by her uncle Boniface to the German mission, where she governed the double monastery of Heidenheim over monks and nuns alike — a trained physician, remembered for healing. Her tomb at Eichstätt has drawn pilgrims for twelve centuries.

A rich Thessalonian who gave everything away in the deserts of Egypt and Palestine, then, made bishop of pagan Gaza against his will, won his hostile city over by patience, courage in plague, and care for the poor.

An Armenian monk whose Book of Lamentations — ninety-five prayers he offered as conversations with God from the depths of the heart — is the treasure of Armenian Christianity, kept under pillows of the sick for a thousand years. Rome declared the monk of Narek a Doctor of the universal Church in 2015.

A Danish-blooded English bishop of the great tenth-century reform, who refounded monasteries, taught in his cathedral school, and died as he had lived — on his knees, washing the feet of twelve poor men, as he did daily in Lent.

A Norman farmer’s son turned missionary to the hidden Christians of Guangxi, arrested within two years, and killed on the leap day of 1856 after refusing to renounce the faith. He stands among the canonized martyrs of China; his death became the pretext of empires, his fidelity the treasure of the Church.