Saints’ feast days in May

A monk of Lérins made archbishop of Arles at twenty-nine, an ascetic who worked the fields, preached brilliantly, and sold church plate to ransom captives — remembered too for his headstrong clash with Pope Leo, which he bore humbly when overruled.

First bishop of Quebec, shepherd of a diocese stretching from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, who founded the seminary that became Laval University, fought the brandy trade that ruined the Indian nations, and after resigning lived on in poverty, rising at two each morning to open the church.

A doctor’s daughter of Viterbo who discovered, gathering neighborhood women for the rosary, how little they knew of the faith — and gave her life to founding free schools for girls, forty of them, walking into towns whose priests sometimes stoned her teachers, and winning them over.

A Cistercian made archbishop in the Alps who reformed his diocese, founded hospices on the passes, and once vanished for a year — found serving as a lay brother in a distant abbey until recognized. Each spring he distributed bread and soup before the harvest, a ‘May bread’ continued for centuries.

An Egyptian conscript soldier converted by the kindness of Christians who fed the prisoners’ barge, he built at Tabennisi the first monastery of the common life — rule, habit, work, and prayer shared under obedience. At his death nine monasteries of men and two of women followed his rule, which influenced Basil and Benedict alike.

A Sardinian Capuchin brother who begged the friary’s bread through the streets of Cagliari for forty years — refusing alms only at the house of a notorious usurer, until obedience sent him back; the sack, they found, dripped blood. It was, he said, the blood of the poor.

Two praetorian soldiers of the first age — their ancient epitaph by Pope Damasus says they threw down shields and bloody weapons at conversion — martyred under Domitian and buried on the estate of Domitilla, in the catacomb that bears her name.

A French priest who scrawled in his boyhood schoolbook that he would never be one — then, converted by a simple uncle-priest, ministered through the Revolution in barns and attics under sentence of death, and afterward co-founded the Daughters of the Cross to teach the poor and nurse the sick.

An English hermit — in a hollow tree trunk, the old accounts say — who joined the Carmelites newly arrived from the Holy Land and as general steered the order into the universities and cities of Europe. Carmelite tradition holds that the Virgin gave him the brown scapular, pledge of her protection.

The first pope to travel to Constantinople, sent under duress by the Arian king Theodoric to plead for Arians in the East — received with immense honor, he crowned the emperor at Easter. Theodoric, suspicious of that very honor, imprisoned him at Ravenna on his return, where he died of hardship.

Peter of Morrone, a hermit of the Abruzzi elected pope at nearly eighty after a two-year deadlock — carried to his coronation on a donkey between two kings. Five months of manipulation convinced him a pope could resign; he did, asking pardon, and died his successor’s prisoner, a hermit to the last.

A ranch-born Mexican priest who built schools, a dam, and a clandestine seminary when the government closed the churches. Arrested on his way to Mass in the Cristero years, he gave his belongings to his executioners and absolved them, dying innocent and asking God that his blood serve the unity of his Mexican brethren. Twenty-four companions share his feast.

A Roman priest, epileptic and scrupulous, who feared the confessional for years — then discovered in it his life’s work among the drovers, prisoners, and homeless women of the city, hearing confessions from dawn and founding a hospice with everything he had.

A monk of the island of Lérins whose Commonitory gave the Church its classic rule for discerning true tradition: that which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all — with genuine development, he added, growing like a body, unchanged in kind.

Giovanni Battista Montini, the shy Vatican diplomat who inherited the Second Vatican Council, steered it home, and bore the storms that followed — the first pope of the age of flight, embracing the patriarch Athenagoras in Jerusalem, addressing the United Nations, giving away the papal tiara for the poor. He died at Castel Gandolfo on the feast of the Transfiguration.

A Roman maiden of the apostolic age, venerated from earliest times beside the tomb of Peter — ancient tradition made her his daughter, perhaps his convert-daughter in the faith. Her fresco in the catacomb of Domitilla shows her leading a soul into paradise; France took her as its first patroness.