Catholic Saint of the Day

Ethelreda, known as Saint Audrey, was an English princess who founded Ely Abbey and is the namesake for the word "tawdry."

Saint Thomas More is the patron Saint of politicians, statesmen, and lawyers. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII as supreme head of the Church of England. He was eventually beheaded on July 6, 1535 his last words being ""I die the king's good servant, but God's first."

Saint Aloysius Gonzaga (1568-1591) renounced his right to the title of Marquis and to the vast wealth he was destined to inherit, he joined the Jesuits. During his training in Rome, he would care for victims of the plague in the streets. He himself contracted the disease as a result of his efforts for the suffering and died on June 21, 1591, at the age of twenty-three, six years short of his ordination as a Jesuit priest.

Saint Paulinus of Nola (353-431) was a Roman Senator who converted to a severe monasticism in 394. He eventually became Bishop of Nola, and helped to resolve the disputed election of Pope Boniface I, and was canonized as a saint.

Saint Romuald, whose aim was to restore the primitive rule to the Order of Saint Benedict, succeeded in founding some hundred monasteries in both Italy and France, and he filled the solitudes with hermitages. The principal monastery was that at Camaldoli, a wild, deserted region, where he built a church, surrounded by a number of separate cells for the solitaries who lived under his rule; his disciples were thus called Camaldolese. For five years the fervent founder was tormented by furious attacks by the demon. He repulsed him, saying, “O enemy! Driven out of heaven, you come to the desert? Depart, ugly serpent, already you have what is due you.” And the shamed adversary would leave him. Saint Romuald’s father, Sergius, was moved by the examples of his son, and entered religion near Ravenna; there he, too, was attacked by hell and thought of abandoning his design. Romuald went to visit him; he showed him the error of the devil’s ruses, and his father died in the monastery, in the odor of sanctity.

Venerable Matt Talbot, born in Dublin, patron of those struggling with alcoholism, was an active alcoholic for nearly 15 years.

Saint Emily de Vialar, Virgin, Foundress of the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Apparition, secretly baptized and taught religion at home post-French Revolution.

Saint John Francis Regis was a French priest of the Society of Jesus. Making himself available to the poor, he spent the afternoon at prisons and hospitals.

Born in 1579 of humble parents at Pibrac, a village about ten miles from Toulouse; died in her native place in 1601. From her birth she seemed marked out for suffering; she came into the world with a deformed hand and the disease of scrofula, and, while yet an infant, lost her mother. Her father soon married again, but his second wife treated Germaine with much cruelty.

Saint Joseph the Hymnographer was the most prolific of the Greek hymn writers. St. Joseph is credited with the composition of about one thousand canons. A native of Sicily, he was forced to leave his island in 830 in the wake of an invasion by the Arabs, journeying to Thessalonica and then to Constantinople. He abandoned the Byzantine capital in 841 to escape the severe Iconoclast per secution, but on his way to Rome he was captured by pirates and held for several years in Crete as a slave.