Just four days after the start of the German-Soviet War, a sick woman asked the local priest, Fr. Mykola Konrad, to hear her confession. Volodymr accompanied the priest, but sometime after their visit, they disappeared.

Our beloved St. Valentine is actually based on several known Valentine or Valentinus martyrs whose exact stories are not absolutely certain. The most popular telling of the legend says that third-century Roman Emperor Claudius II outlawed marriage for young men — because single men made better soldiers than those who were married.

My husband and I are not saints. God willing, we still have many decades left to foster our relationship with God, to leave a good impact on the world, to keep striving for holiness… to mess up, to get knocked down, to go into the confessional and promise to be better. We know our path won’t be a straight line but we hope and pray that we will fight the good fight, run the race, and keep the faith (2 Timothy 4:7).

So how did St. Nicholas of Myra — also known for (literally) fighting heresy — become Santa Claus? As the National Geographic says, “Nicholas was neither fat nor jolly but developed a reputation as a fiery, wiry, and defiant defender of church doctrine during the Great Persecution in 303, when Bibles were burned and priests made to renounce Christianity or face execution.”

Happy All Saints’ Day!

In honor of this wonderful feast, I decided this month’s Married Saints blog would be a little different. Today I want to explore several of our saints to give you an overview of wonderful patrons you might not have considered for your marriage before.

Have you figured out how you know about Sts. Louis and Zélie yet? Their youngest daughter was born on January 2, 1873, and was not expected to survive long outside the womb. After their four losses already, Zélie and Louis prepared for the worst. Zélie wrote, “I have no hope of saving her. The poor little thing suffers horribly … It breaks your heart to see her.”2 But this little girl grew stronger and became a Carmelite nun.

Isidore and Maria show the beautiful complementarity of spouses. Isidore worked the fields, evangelizing with his actions, while Maria prepared to continue serving God’s people from the home. Without Isidore there would be no one to feed, but without Maria there would be no food to give.

Elizabeth’s words would be repeated for millennia to follow, memorialized in Scripture and with every Catholic reciting them a seemingly infinite number of times over our lives: Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.