There’s a saint for everyone and everything, it seems. A saint of professional pasty crimpers, for example. He was Cornish, as one might have guessed, and is also the patron saint of tin miners and cream clotters. (Might this imply an ecclesiastical position on the cream first vs jam first debate?) A saint for farriers – basically horse podiatrists/manicurists. A saint to be invoked against wolves. Yet none of these spiritual “use cases” are particularly widespread in this day and age, one would think.
However, there are also saints for more modern things. St Clare of Assisi is the patron saint of television – dubious honour – because she saw a church service (which she was too sick to attend) projected on the wall of her cell. St Joseph of Cupertino is the patron saint of air travellers, since he was known to levitate. Also the patron saint of students facing exams, since he was also known to be “remarkably unclever” but miraculously passed his exams anyway. St Carlo Acutis is the patron saint of gamers, because he was one – born in 1991, he’s one of the most recent of the Catholic saints.
Yet with all these modern patronages from saints old and new, I feel there are still some gaps which could do with filling in today’s world, and I have here a few suggestions.
St Sebastian, famous for being the one stuck through with arrows, was a captain of the Praetorian Guard – the emperor’s bodyguards – but also a Christian, a faith varying in legality depending on the whim of whoever was in power. Not only was he a Christian, but one who was drawing other people to become Christians too. When the emperor found out, the resulting confrontation was unpleasant, to say the least, and ended with Sebastian – who stood his moral ground – tied to a tree and executed by being shot so full of arrows he looked like a pincushion, thus becoming the patron saint of archers and pin-makers.
But it turns out he wasn’t quite dead, and once he’d been nursed back to health he lay in wait for the emperor… and told him he needed to repent of his many and various sins. The emperor didn’t like this conversation any better than the last one, and had him executed again – this time by clubbing, and rather more effectively. (Unsurprisingly, artists prefer to depict the dramatic arrow scene, rather than his actual martyrdom. Any idiot can draw a club.) However, I feel Sebastian is entitled to become the patron saint of As Per My Previous Email for his persistence in trying to communicate important information to someone who wasn’t listening.
Leaping forward in time, but remaining in what is now Italy, we have St Agnes of Assisi, the rather less famous sister of the aforementioned St Clare of Assisi. She ran away to be a nun just a couple of weeks after her sister did, but this was one daughter too many for her father. He sent their uncle and a bunch of relatives and other henchmen to remove Agnes by force from the monastery where she and Clare were staying. Missing no opportunity to put the boot in, they were dragging poor Agnes out of the building when her body suddenly became intensely heavy – too heavy for the whole gang to lift.
Her thuggy uncle, who was enraged by this thwarting, drew his sword and prepared to lop Agnes’s head off. (I’m not sure how he thought he was going to explain this to her father. “Did you get her back?” “No, she got supernaturally heavy. But I did chop her head off!” Clearly a bit “of Cupertino” in his mental processes.) But then his arm withered. At which point he – and the relatives, the henchmen, old uncle Tom Cobley and all – realized that they were dealing with something which was waaaaay outta their pay grade, and they very sensibly went home and left her to it. This makes Agnes the ideal contender in my view to be the patron saint of I’m Not Going Out (And You Can’t Make Me).
I admit that Julian of Norwich, who was actually walled up – at her request – in a couple of rooms attached to her local church could be an even more ideal patron saint of Not Going Out, were it not that she for some reason has never been made a saint (though she is quoted by the Catholic catechism).
Finally, we have St Anthony the Great/the Hermit/the Anchorite/the Abbot/of Thebes/of Egypt/of the Desert. As a young man who found himself minus two parents, plus one little sister, and plus rather a lot of personal property, he arranged suitable care for his sister, sold up everything he had, and gave the profits to the poor. Then he went into the desert, where he spent much of the rest of his very long life trying to get away from the quantities of people who kept showing up.
In fact, so many would-be disciples settled around his precise part of the middle of nowhere that he ended up emerging in order to organize them into what turned out to be the beginning of monasticism, thus becoming the Father of All Monks. But he is also, in my view, a great candidate for patron saint of Extreme Decluttering and that feeling so familiar in the modern era: I Just Want To Get Away From It All.
So those are my three candidates for modern patron sainthoods. What suggestions do you have?