Saints’ feast days in March

A princess betrothed in turn to dukes and emperors who refused them all for Christ, founded Prague’s great hospital and the first Poor Clare convent north of the Alps, and exchanged letters with Clare of Assisi that still survive. Her canonization in November 1989 came days before her country’s freedom.

Heiress of a Philadelphia banking fortune who asked Leo XIII to send missionaries to America’s Indian and Black communities — and was told by the pope to become a missionary herself. She did: her Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament and twenty million dollars built more than sixty schools, Xavier University of Louisiana among them.

A Neapolitan Franciscan of the strictest observance who never left off the one habit he had received at sixteen, governed as provincial with a mother’s gentleness, and was so besieged for counsel that the friary door had to be repaired yearly.

An Irish wandering monk honored as the apostle of the Upper Rhine, founder of the island monastery of Säckingen, whose memory the Swiss canton of Glarus bears on its very flag.

A Scots Calvinist convert who returned to his country as a hunted Jesuit, ministered in secret for less than a year, and was betrayed, tortured with sleep deprivation for over a week, and hanged at Glasgow at thirty-six — Scotland’s only canonized post-Reformation martyr.

A priest of Muslim Córdoba who recorded and encouraged the martyrs of his generation, wrote to strengthen the faithful from prison, was elected archbishop of Toledo but never consecrated: he was beheaded for sheltering a convert girl, Leocritia, who followed him in death four days later.

A twenty-one-year-old Numidian conscript who refused the army oath because, as a Christian, he could not serve as a soldier. Offered the emperor’s service and badge, he answered that his badge was Christ’s, and was beheaded — the early Church’s clearest voice of conscientious objection.

Eldest of four sibling saints and Isidore’s teacher, he converted the Visigothic kings of Spain from Arianism — enduring exile for it — presided over the great council of Toledo, and introduced the creed into the Mass. Gregory the Great, his friend, dedicated books to him.

Wife of the German king Henry the Fowler and mother of an emperor, an archbishop, and two rebellious sons who twice stripped her of her dower for giving too much away. She founded abbeys, taught the poor, and answered plunder with more almsgiving.

Chancellor to Emperor Otto III and then archbishop of Cologne, remembered for founding Deutz abbey, for reconciliation with a hostile new emperor whom he won over completely, and for an almsgiving so systematic the poor of the city called the palace theirs.

Shepherd, monk of Melrose, prior of Lindisfarne, and hermit of Farne Island, called from his birds and seals to be bishop for two years — walking his wild diocese, healing and reconciling through plague. His incorrupt body, carried by monks fleeing the Danes, founded Durham.

A tiny Oxford carpenter, Jesuit lay brother, who for twenty-six years built the priest-holes of England — ingenious hides that saved hundreds of lives, working alone by night. Captured at last, he was torn to death on the Tower rack rather than betray a single one.

A Spanish law professor made archbishop of Lima while still a layman, who crossed his vast Andean diocese three times on foot, learned the Indian languages, produced the first trilingual catechism of the Americas, championed the conquered against their conquerors, and confirmed Rose of Lima and Martin de Porres.

The bookish, cautious archbishop of San Salvador whom the murder of his friend Rutilio Grande transformed into the voice of his voiceless people. His Sunday sermons, broadcast nationwide, named the disappeared one by one. The day after begging soldiers, in the name of God, to stop the repression, he was shot dead at the altar.

The criminal crucified at the Lord’s right hand who rebuked his mocking fellow, owned the justice of his own sentence, and asked only to be remembered — and received the largest promise in Scripture: ‘This day you shall be with me in Paradise.’ The Church keeps him as patron of prisoners and of deathbed conversions.

A Frisian educated at York who evangelized his own people and the conquered Saxons — by persuasion, notably, where Charlemagne had used the sword — founded the abbey that became the city of Münster, and served as its first bishop.

A Frankish bishop who carried the faith into Bavaria at the duke’s invitation, founded the church and monastery of St. Peter amid Roman ruins at a place of salt springs — Salzburg — and is honored as that city’s founder and first archbishop.

A Merovingian king whom Gregory of Tours, no flatterer of kings, called ‘good King Guntram’: a protector of the Church and the poor in a brutal dynasty, generous in famine and plague, who repented publicly of the sins of his early reign.

Two Persian monks who encouraged imprisoned Christians during King Shapur’s great persecution, were arrested themselves, and met elaborate tortures with the answer that they could not prefer a king who dies to the King who lives. The ancient Acts of their martyrdom survive.

Monk and late-in-life abbot of Sinai, author of the Ladder of Divine Ascent — thirty rungs from renunciation to love, one for each year of the Lord’s hidden life. Eastern monasteries still read it aloud every Lent; his very name means ‘of the Ladder.’

A Persian deacon released from prison on the Roman ambassador’s pledge that he would cease preaching — a pledge Benjamin refused to keep, asking how he could withhold the light. After a year of open preaching he was martyred under Bahram V.