A Choice of Saints
It seems sainthood is the question of the hour for me – so I’m running with it. There we were, just a pair of innocents driving down the street, when we saw a license plate that said “StBndct.” Sometimes you really have to try to parse a vanity plate. In this case, one can tell right away that it’s an invocation to St. Benedict. But why? What’s he the patron Saint of, anyway, and why should he in particular be looking out for the welfare of this Toyota?
A little research turned up the fact that Good Old St. Ben is actually the Patron Saint of a lot of stuff: Agricultural workers, civil engineers, coppersmiths, dying people, Europe, farmers, fever, gall stones, heraldry, inflammatory diseases, Italian architects, kidney disease, monks, nettle rash, servants who have broken their master’s belongings, spelunkers, and temptations.
Whoa. I mean, that’s a lot of shit to be the Patron Saint of. Patron Saint of temptations? Pro or con? Did Otis Williams know this? The Patron Saint of dying people? Isn’t that pretty much everyone, eventually? That’s a pretty big gig. Plus having to look after all of Europe. And why civil engineers and Italian architects in particular?
And you know, it’s got to be a bit of a bummer to have to be the Patron Saint of kidney and inflammatory diseases, plus the gall stones. Who decides this? And I still don’t know why the Toyota was claiming him – a European model car would have made more sense. Maybe the driver was a coppersmith, or a particularly clumsy butler.
Some further discussion lead to the topic of the patronage of saints in general. It turns out, and some of you may know this, but there are more than 800 saints of something or other. I knew that St. Christopher was the patron saint of travelers, but Bona of Pisa has them also, covering not just travelers in general but flight attendants in particular. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of rhyme or reason: Augustine of Hippo covers printers and brewers, Bernard of Clairvaux looks after bee keepers and overpaid Madison Avenue advertising executives. St. Christopher also covers bookbinders, gardeners, and pilots. I knew St. Jude was for lost causes, but it turns out that undertakers have their own saint (Dismas), as do coffee house owners (Drogo), locksmiths (Dunstan), and lawyers and lumberjacks (Genesius and Gummarus, respectively).
Nurses and shepherds seem to have a lot of patron saints. St. Malo covers pig-keepers, while St. Roch drew surgeons and gravediggers – two sides of one coin, I suppose. St. Veronica was famous for her veil, which became the Shroud of Turin; seems kinda mean to make her the patron saint of laundry workers, but there you go.
I have to wonder, is there a beautific game of cards going on somewhere, where the saints swap these patronages around when someone is newly canonized? Poor St. Agatha got stuck being patron saint of breast cancer, while St. Christina the Astonishing is the saint against insanity and mental disorders. I suppose she was astonished to get picked for that. And it really seems mean-spirited that the patron of the blind and the lame is Saint Abel. Seems pretty ableist to me.
I can see them sitting around a heavenly table playing cards, halos slung over their chairs, bitching about their lot.
St. Damien of Molokai: “Oh man, leprosy? Really? That’s just gross.”
St. Edmund the Martyr of East Anglia: “Just one disease? Quit your bitching, I drew pandemics. Besides, hardly anyone even gets leprosy any more.”
St. Fiacre: “I’ll trade you there, Ed. I’d rather have a nice quick pandemic than my divine plate full of venereal diseases and hemorrhoids! Hey, Vitus, wake up! What’d you get?”
St. Vitus: “Heh, sorry, yeah, that sucks. I got oversleeping.”
St. Edmund the Martyr of East Anglia: “Oversleeping? We need a damn saint for oversleeping? Pansy. Gummy, what the hell are you singing?”
St. Gummarus: “Oh, I’ve got lumberjacks and I’m OK….”
St. Fiacre: “Shut it, you. Someone shuffle the cards again, huh? Come on guys, I hate hemorrhoids.”
In light of the fact that it seems like you can self-select your own patron saint and the poor sod of a saint just has to live with it, I think bloggers need their own. I know Saint Isidore is the patron for the Internet in general, but I’m declaring St. Arnold of Soissons to be the Patron Saint of Bloggers. He was probably bored, just covering beer and those who pick hops – he should have plenty of time to watch after the bloggers!
Besides, now I can have a beer and pretend I’m working.
So…St. Jude is your primary and St. Ben is the specialist?