Saints’ feast days in November

The apostle of Burgundy by ancient tradition — a missionary priest martyred at Dijon in the second century’s persecutions. Gregory of Tours tells how doubt about the old tomb ended in its vindication; the great abbey and cathedral of Saint-Bénigne rose above it, mother-church of the city.

Reforming archbishop of Armagh who reknit the Irish church to Rome, restored the sacraments among a people grown wild in war, and twice crossed Europe to see the pope. He was Bernard of Clairvaux’s dearest friend, and died in his arms at Clairvaux on All Souls’ Day — Bernard wrote his Life and asked to be buried beside him.

The aged priest struck silent for doubting the angel, whose tongue was loosed at his son’s naming into the Benedictus the Church sings every morning; and his wife, ‘righteous before God,’ the first to hail Mary as ‘mother of my Lord.’ In them the Old Covenant’s long waiting greets the New.

A young recruit — ‘Tiron’ — of the imperial legions in Pontus who declared himself a Christian, burned the temple of the Mother of the Gods, and was martyred by fire. One of the great warrior-saints of the East, his shrine at Euchaita drew pilgrims for a thousand years.

Abbot of Glendalough at twenty-six and first Irish-born archbishop of Dublin, hostage as a boy and peacemaker all his life — negotiating between Irish kings and Norman invaders, wearing a hairshirt under his robes, feeding hosts of the poor. He died at Eu in Normandy on yet another embassy of peace, content to leave the world without a penny.

Given to the monastery of Helfta at four, a brilliant, worldly student until at twenty-five Christ appeared to her, promising to save and deliver her. Her Herald of Divine Love records a mystical life centered on the Sacred Heart, the liturgy, and the souls in purgatory — the only woman the Church styles ‘the Great.’

A daughter of revolutionary Grenoble who waited thirty years to be a missionary, then sailed at forty-nine with four Religious of the Sacred Heart to the Missouri frontier, opening the first free school west of the Mississippi. At seventy-one she finally reached the Potawatomi, who — unable to teach her their language — named her for what they saw: ‘the woman who prays always.’

A Polish military engineer sentenced to death — commuted to ten years’ Siberian exile — for his part in the 1863 rising, where his serenity steadied his fellow prisoners. Freed, he became a Discalced Carmelite, restored the order in Poland, and sat in the confessional so long they called him ‘the martyr of the confessional.’

The young king of East Anglia defeated by the Great Heathen Army, who refused to rule as a pagan’s puppet or renounce Christ — shot full of arrows and beheaded, tradition says, at Hoxne. Bury St. Edmunds grew around his shrine; before St. George, he was England’s patron.

An African-born pope, more servant than sovereign, as his epitaph remembers him, famous for feeding a starving Rome and for the letter distinguishing the ‘two powers’ of priest and emperor — a sentence quoted for a millennium. He fixed the canon of Scripture in the West and gave his name to the oldest Roman sacramentary.

A Conventual Franciscan of Lucera in Apulia — ‘Padre Maestro’ to his people — professor, provincial, and above all confessor and father of the poor, who each Advent begged gifts for the prisoners and orphans. At his death the children of Lucera ran through the streets crying that the saint was dead.

A Burgundian farm girl, motherless at nine, who kept her father’s house and dovecote before joining the Daughters of Charity — where in the rue du Bac chapel in 1830 the Virgin sat beside her and gave the design of the Miraculous Medal. She told only her confessor, and spent forty-six years in perfect obscurity tending the old men of a hospice; the sisters learned who she was on her deathbed.

First bishop of Toulouse, whose daily walk past the capitol was blamed for silencing the pagan oracles; seized and bidden to sacrifice, he refused, and was tied to the temple’s bull and dragged to death. The church of Notre-Dame du Taur marks where the rope broke, and the great basilica of Saint-Sernin holds his relics.