Story Time!
While I was in Washington DC for the March For Life last year, I was invited to a party. Honestly, this English accent of mine gets me in everywhere… 🙂
Anyway, each guest was asked to come prepared with a relatively unknown Saint story to share with the everyone else. Clearly this party was organized by my kind of Catholic nerd! Naturally, I told the story of this blog’s patron, St. Drogo.
However, I also came prepared with another story, not about a Saint, but about a Saint’s brother. Since it was recently the ordination anniversary of my former Pastor, Fr. Robert, I thought it would be appropriate to share that story today.
Many of you might have heard of St Jerome. He was a great biblical scholar of the Early Church and he was the one who produced the Vulgate, the official translation into Latin of the original Biblical texts. This story is about Jerome’s younger brother Paulinian, sometimes known as Paulinanus.
In this month’s “Theology on Tap” here in San Diego we had a talk by Bernadeane Carr entitled “Saints: Our friends in high places”. In it, she talked about the Saints who are associated with a particular cause, complaint or profession, the Saints whom we call “Patron Saints”. I therefore wanted to share with you some of the more…erm…”interesting” patron Saints I’ve come across. Believe it or not, there is a Patron Saint of unattractive people…
Saint Drogo is the patron Saint of unattractive people because during one pilgrimage he contracted a disease which caused him to develop severe bodily deformities. The people of the village built a small cell attached to the local church to provide him with a place to live and to also protect them from seeing his deformities (nice, hey?!). St. Drogo stayed in his cell for the next forty years, having no contact with anyone, except to receive his simple sustenance: barley, water and the Eucharist.