Saints’ feast days in June

A priest and an exorcist of Rome, beheaded secretly in a wood so their graves might be unknown — but their executioner, converted, revealed the place. Constantine raised a basilica over them, and their names entered the Roman Canon, where they remain.

A Neapolitan noble, cured of a disfiguring disease in youth, who co-founded the Minor Clerks Regular — vowed, uniquely, not to seek office — and added to their life perpetual adoration by turns. He begged for the poor, slept little, and died on the eve of Corpus Christi, at forty-four, eager to go to heaven.

A worldly canon of Xanten thrown from his horse by lightning, who rose to give everything away and walk Europe barefoot preaching peace. At Prémontré he founded his white canons; as archbishop of Magdeburg he entered his city barefoot, and defended the Eucharist so ardently he is painted with a monstrance.

A Yorkshire priest among the founders of Fountains Abbey — begun in midwinter under an elm — and first abbot of Newminster, from which three daughter houses rose in his lifetime. Bernard of Clairvaux was his friend; gentleness with the wayward was his mark.

A Frankish bishop of Noyon remembered across the French countryside for protecting farmers and vineyards — folk weather-lore still turns on his feast — and for consecrating the penitent queen Radegund, who fled her murderous husband to become a nun and a saint.

Bishop of Paris under the Merovingians who, in the famine of 650, sold his own goods and even the sacred vessels to feed the starving — and founded by the river a hospital for the poor, St. Christopher’s, which grew into the Hôtel-Dieu: the oldest hospital in the world still serving the sick.

An Augustinian friar of Salamanca whose preaching named the sins of the powerful so plainly that a duke sent assassins — who returned converted. He calmed the city’s blood feuds, was famous for reconciling enemies, and died, many believed, poisoned for reproving a nobleman’s adultery.

A Sicilian monk imprisoned seven years in a tomb-like cell for defending the holy icons; when the persecution fell, he was made patriarch of Constantinople and presided over the icons’ restoration in 843 — the ‘Triumph of Orthodoxy’ the Eastern Church still celebrates each Lent.

A shepherd girl of Pibrac, sickly and deformed, despised by her stepmother, who slept under the stairs and shared her scraps of bread with beggars. She heard Mass daily, leaving her sheep to her guardian angel — they never strayed — and was found dead at twenty-two on her straw. Her body, unearthed incorrupt, undid the village’s contempt.

A Flemish Cistercian mystic — among the first devoted to the Sacred Heart, exchanging hearts with Christ in vision — who spent her last eleven years blind, offering three seven-year fasts for the Church. Asked what gift she wanted, she asked only for the Heart of Christ.

A one-legged veteran of the Polish uprising and a painter of real gifts who abandoned art — leaving his Ecce Homo unfinished — to live in Kraków’s poorhouse among its outcasts, founding the Albertine brothers and sisters to serve them. Karol Wojtyła wrote a play about him and called him a spiritual father.

A Venetian diplomat’s son who organized plague relief in Rome, then as bishop of Bergamo and Padua poured his fortune into seminaries, libraries, and a printing press with fonts for eastern tongues — dreaming of reunion with the Greek Church. He gave literally everything; his household inventory at death fit on a page.

A Ravenna noble who fled to a monastery in horror after his father killed a man in a duel — and spent seventy years founding hermitages across Italy, joining the hermit’s solitude to the monk’s obedience in the Camaldolese order. His little rule survives, bidding the monk sit in his cell as in paradise and watch his thoughts as a good fisherman watches for fish.

Son of Pope Hormisdas, elected to Peter’s chair in dangerous times: refusing the empress Theodora’s demand to restore a condemned patriarch, he was framed with forged letters, deposed by the general Belisarius, and exiled to the barren island of Palmarola, where he starved to death. The faithful honored his grave as a martyr’s from the first.

An Italian pilgrim-hermit who settled on the bare heights of Montevergine and found disciples gathering despite him; the abbey he founded there, with its shrine of the Virgin, still crowns the mountain. He ended his days founding houses across the Norman south, counselor to its king.

An Aragonese priest who in 1928 ‘saw’ Opus Dei: ordinary Christians called to holiness through their daily work, sanctifying the world from within. He crossed the Pyrenees on foot in the Civil War, built the Work across the world from Rome, and left in The Way and his preaching one insistent message: your everyday life is the stuff of sanctity.

The nameless multitude Nero blamed for the burning of Rome: sewn into beasts’ skins for the dogs, crucified, burned as torches for his gardens — ‘a vast multitude,’ Tacitus wrote, condemned finally not for arson but for who they were. The Church keeps them the day after Peter and Paul, shepherds and flock together.