Saints alive!

Knowing me and where I'm from I bet a few of you thought this would be a post about the New Orleans Saints.  Not today.  One of the many decisions I made while putting this blog together was to follow the life of the Saints.  It started out just with the more well known Saints but some time back I decided to try and do at least a Saint of the day.  Some days the pickings are much slimmer than others.  For example, today was a trifecta with the likes of St. Thomas More, St. John Fisher and even St. Paulinas of Nola.  And then there will be those days where I look at the calendar and there is little to pick from.  Of course that is not altogether true.  Using different websites I can pull up a calendar with all the Saints whose feast day falls on any given day.  Sometimes I do not recognize a single name and the stories are very short or even mention that not much is known about this Saint.  Still I have mostly been able to post about a Saint every day of the week.

I believe it is important to know about the lives of the Saints and use their personal stories as examples for living a truly Christian life.  These are the men and women that the Church has declared a Saint, a person whose faith has earned them the reward of eternal life.  Amomg the many Saints we have the Apostles, early Church Fathers, martyrs, virgins, and founders of religious orders.  Saints include men and women, rich and poor, black and white, young and old and come from practically every nation on the earth.  There is much to be learned about our faith by reading the lives of the Saints, even those we know little about.

For now I plan to continue posting, hopefully daily if possible, the lives of the Saints.  There is much that even us Deacons, and dare I say, all clergy could learn looking up the Saints of each day of the year.  The attached article I found the other day at Aggie Catholics and the author refers to several little known Saints; names that we would hardly hear at the next Confirmation ceremony we would attend:

http://marysaggies.blogspot.com/2010/06/top-35-saints-names-rarely-picked-for.html