Saints’ feast days in January

Fifth abbot of Cluny for half a century, who ransomed captives, fed famines, and instituted the commemoration of All Souls on November 2 — a monk’s gift of prayer to all the dead, which the whole Church adopted.

A frail, barely lettered Holy Cross brother who kept the door of a Montreal college for forty years — and whose prayers to St. Joseph healed so many that a mountain shrine, St. Joseph’s Oratory, rose from his nickel collections. A million people filed past his coffin.

The apostle of the crumbling Danube frontier, who appeared among terrified Roman towns as the empire fell, organizing relief, ransoming prisoners, and founding monasteries — refusing to say where he came from, content to be known only as a servant of God.

An African-born monk who twice refused the see of Canterbury, then accompanied the man he recommended, Theodore, and led its school for nearly forty years — making England, in Bede’s words, a land of scholars in Greek and Latin.

Younger brother of Basil the Great and the deepest thinker of the Cappadocian fathers. His Life of Moses reads the soul’s endless ascent into God — ‘from one glory to another’ — and his defense of Nicaea earned him the council fathers’ title ‘pillar of orthodoxy.’

A Cappadocian monk in the Judean desert whose monastery grew into a city of prayer with hospitals for the sick, the aged, and the mentally afflicted — the first of their kind — and who defied an emperor’s heresy in extreme old age.

A Frenchwoman who sailed to the raw settlement of Montreal, opened its first school in a stable, and founded an uncloistered teaching congregation that followed the settlers wherever they went — the first woman saint of Canada.

A priest of Nola near Naples who suffered imprisonment in the Decian persecution, hid from his pursuers — a spider’s web across the cave mouth saved him, the old account says — and afterward refused the bishopric, farming a rented field to have alms for the poor.

Fleeing the Decian persecution as a youth, he lived some ninety years in the Egyptian desert unknown to the world, until the aged Antony, warned in a dream, found him days before his death — and buried him, tradition says, with the help of two lions.

Pope after a four-year vacancy caused by persecution, he reorganized the shattered Roman church and held a hard line on reconciling those who had lapsed — riots followed, and the emperor banished him from the city he had just rebuilt.

A Hungarian princess offered to God before birth for the country’s deliverance from the Mongols, who held her royal father to the bargain — refusing two crowns to remain a Dominican nun on her Danube island, taking the convent’s lowest work for herself.

The last great Anglo-Saxon bishop, who survived the Norman Conquest at Worcester by sheer holiness, rebuilt his cathedral while weeping for the old one, and with Lanfranc broke the slave trade running out of Bristol.

Deacon of Saragossa and protomartyr of Spain, tortured with fire and iron at Valencia in Diocletian’s persecution. The judge Dacian, the ancient account says, confessed himself beaten by the deacon’s joy. His fame spread across the whole Church within a generation.

A Franciscan hospital administrator of Syracuse, New York, who answered the plea no one else would: she led six sisters to the leper settlements of Hawaii, nursed the dying Fr. Damien, and mothered the exiles of Molokai for thirty years — never catching the disease.

The reluctant disciple of Damascus told in a vision to seek out the persecutor Saul — ‘Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much harm he has done to your saints.’ He went, laid hands on him, called him ‘Brother Saul,’ and baptized the apostle to the nations.

A British monk-historian whose fiery book On the Ruin of Britain called kings and clergy to repentance amid the Saxon invasions — the one written voice surviving from his island’s darkest century. He ended his days a hermit in Brittany.

Forced into a convent she did not want, she kept private luxuries for ten years until a confessor’s rebuke broke her heart open. She became the community’s severest penitent and founded confraternities to serve prisoners, the sick, and the aged of Viterbo.