When Snoop Dogg passed through Willie Nelson’s neck of the woods during South By Southwest in March, he took some time to pay tribute to his unlikely friend.When he was a kid going to Catholic school on Chicago’s south side, Thomas Craughwell remembers being called out to his mom by one of the teaching sisters.
No, not exactly for misbehavior. The sister, he says, was upset because he knew more about saints than she did.
Even as a child, Craughwell, author of “Patron Saints: Saints for Every Member of Your Family, Every Profession, Every Ailment, Every Emergency and Even Every Amusement,” collected facts about saints the way other kids might learn baseball players’ stats or the names of obscure dinosaurs.
The book is newly issued by Huntington-based Catholic publishing house Our Sunday Visitor.
“I always liked patron saints from the time I was a kid,” the 55-year-old says. “When I was a kid, to be perfectly honest, I liked all the gory stories – St. Sebastian being shot through by arrows and St. Ignatius being thrown to the lions. Being a boy, I was all over that.
“Now what I enjoy is going back to the original sources and learning about the personalities of the saints. … They’re fascinating, and they weren’t always holy.”
Catholics invoke the aid of a specific saint when they pray. While some profess devotion to a saint for a serious cause – such as St. Gianna, sought out by women facing difficult pregnancies because she gave up her own life rather than end the life of her unborn child – saints aren’t always taken so seriously.
Craughwell says he’s heard about people who invoke “St. Tony” (Anthony, patron saint of the lost), to help them find their car keys or “St. Mike” (Michael, the archangel, protector against evil) to help them quit smoking.
He even has a friend who refers to her patron, Philomena, martyred as a teenager and believed to aid those in desperate situations, simply as “Phil.”
“I don’t think it’s sacrilegious,” Craughwell says. “It shows they’re not just holy role models but friends. … People feel an emotional attachment to their saints.”
Unlike the process of becoming a saint – a highly Vatican-regulated process that can take centuries – later becoming a patron saint is unregulated by the church.
Saints become patrons because of the beliefs of individuals and groups of Catholics, Craughwell says. People find something in the saint’s life that resonates with a situation they face, and they turn to the saint.
In the United States, devotion to saints suffered several decades of neglect, and even derision as superstition, in the years before and right after the 1960s and Vatican II’s reforms to bring the church into a modern era.
But he thinks saints are again on the rise.
“I think the saints have enjoyed something of a comeback because of (the late Pope) John Paul II. … He encouraged devotion to the saints by canonizing and beatifying new saints and by encouraging people to turn to the saints for intercession,” Craughwell says.
“I think the reason Catholics are so attached to our saints is … they have all the virtues that we’d like to possess and yet they’ve dealt with the same challenges we deal with every day,” he continues.
Their stories, rather than making us see our shortcomings, are encouraging, he says. “If they could handle the same kinds of stresses and temptations we have and usually much worse, that gives us hope.”
