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THREE MINUTES WITH THE SAINTS
St. Francis de Sales: The Patron Saint of Writers
The Church knows writers need all the help we can get
The Catholic Church has a patron saint for just about everything, including things that would not be invented until 1400 years after the saint died (as with Saint Isidore of Seville, patron saint of the internet) and things that don’t at first glance seem all that saintly (like beer, which has Saint Arnold of Metz as its patron). Growing up, I knew that my main patron saint was obviously St. Paul, and when it came time to choose a patron saint for my confirmation I picked St. Matthew because Sister Dorothy Ann vetoed my original choices of St. Hilarius and Saint Olav the Fat.
Had I known at that time I would be a writer, I might have gone a different route (at 13, I still believed that I would someday play center for the Los Angeles Lakers when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar retired, despite the fact that I am just a tad over six feet tall). I could have chosen St. Jude, the patron of hopeless causes (which making a living as a writer certainly feels like) or St. Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin and was, like I would become, notoriously grumpy. The best choice, however, would be the actual patron saint of writers: St. Francis de Sales. In today’s installment of “Three…
