I had never really thought of people still becoming saints nowadays except for the odd Pope I suppose.  During lunch I mentioned my new learned knowledge to the bar owner.   “How many saints are there I asked” he said one for every day of the year and a few spares” but as he pointed out “we get two birthdays in Catholic countries because you have your own day of birth and then you have your saint´s day.  It´s a bit like your Queen Elizabeth, she has her real birthday then she has her offical one”.  It made sense.

I started to have a look at some of the saints and discovered that they don´t all have that slightly pained, dewy eyed look that we so often see in biblical paintings.  Some of them have an unenviable patronage burden to bear.   That jolly chubby man dressed in red who delivers your children´s presents every Christmas is modelled on a saint who is the patron saint of prostitutes – St Nickolas.  It brings that phrase from Goodfellas “she is not doing that with the mouth that kisses my children goodnight” into a whole new realm of what is acceptable.  Delivering presents to little children one minute and providing succour to hookers the next!   Or what about poor old  Saint Fiacre who is the patron saint of cab drivers and hemorrhoids – a strange combination, I grant you but maybe it is all that sitting down and driving about looking for fares that causes the problem.  Then there is St Clair of Assisi who got lumbered with the sainthood for televisions.  The fact she was born and indeed died  long before the thing had been invented seems to be unimportant and poor St Gertrude of Nivelles who is the patron saint of suriphobia or the fear of mice and is now depicted covered in the wriggling creatures.  Continuing  the animal theme there is St Hubert of Liege who is the patron saint of mad dogs and then there is Saint Monica the patron saint of Alcoholics.  The poor woman was married to a bad tempered pagan named Patricius and she prayed constantly for the conversion of her recalcitrant husband and two sons.  However, she had not been as pure as you might think, she was in fact a reformed alcoholic herself.

Well those are only a few of our saints but they are among the more interesting and some of the ones we can definitely relate to.   So next time you are in the Art Gallery looking a canvass depicting a pale faced saint gazing upwards towards  heaven with his hands clasped in prayer just think that it might be the haemorrhoids causing that look not divine worship.