Family and marriage

Any of these can be asked. There is no order of precedence and no wrong choice, so pick whoever the story fits.

• St. AgnesMartyred at about thirteen. Her name means lamb, and Rome has kept it for seventeen centuries.
• St. Angela MericiFounded the first teaching order of women: school for girls, centuries early.
• St. AnneThe mother of Mary, asked for by mothers and grandmothers.
• St. Anthony of PaduaAsked for lost things, and by extension for anything gone missing.
• St. Basil the GreatOne soul in two bodies: half of the Church’s great friendship, and the first hospital builder.
• St. Bridget of SwedenMother of eight, widow, mystic: she spent her last decades telling popes to come home.
• St. CasimirThe prince who walked away from an unjust war at thirteen: Lithuania’s beloved young saint.
• St. Catherine of AlexandriaThe girl who out argued the emperor’s philosophers, by tradition, and patron of students ever since.
• St. Catherine of GenoaA miserable marriage, a plague hospital, and the warmest book on purgatory ever written.
• St. Elizabeth Ann SetonWidowed in quarantine, converted at full cost, and the first American born saint.
• St. Elizabeth of PortugalShe rode a mule between two arrayed armies, her husband’s and her son’s, and stopped the battle.
• St. Frances of RomeForty years a wife in plague era Rome: proof that the vocation you did not choose still counts.
• St. HelenaSet aside by an emperor for politics, mother of the next one, and the Church’s great seeker of the Cross.
• St. Hilary of PoitiersA pagan philosopher who read his way to God, then defended the Trinity from exile, courteously.
• St. JoachimMary’s father: the grandfather of Jesus, patron of grandfathers and long awaited answers.
• St. John Paul IIThe pope who gave the rosary its first new mysteries in centuries, and forgave the man who shot him.
• St. John the ApostleThe beloved disciple, at the cross when the others ran, and given the Lord’s mother.
• St. JosephHusband of Mary, a working man, and the patron of a peaceful death.
• St. Louis IXThe king who judged the poor under an oak tree, and wrote his son the letter every father means to write.
• St. MalachyHe reformed the Irish church and died in Bernard’s arms, and the famous prophecy under his name is a forgery.
• St. Margaret ClitherowThe butcher’s wife of the Shambles who hid priests, and refused to plead, to spare her children.
• St. Margaret of CortonaNine years a nobleman’s mistress, a son, a murder, and then the Franciscans’ Third Light.
• St. Margaret of ScotlandThe exiled princess who civilized a court, mothered kings, and taught her husband to love the books he could not read.
• St. Marguerite d'YouvilleWidow of a bootlegger, mocked as the tipsy sisters: she took the insult as a name.
• St. MonicaPrayed seventeen years for a son who had left the faith.
• St. Raphael the ArchangelThe archangel of healing, safe travel, and finding the right person.
• St. Rita of CasciaMarried into violence, outlived it, and is asked for in impossible situations.
• St. Rose of LimaThe first canonized saint of the Americas: needlework by day, the poor in her family’s spare room.
• St. Simon the ZealotThe political radical seated at the same table as the tax collector.
• St. Théophane VénardHe wrote letters from a cage that read like spring, and Thérèse kept his picture until she died.
• St. ValentineA martyred priest of Rome. The love came later, and it fits.
• Sts. Louis and Zélie MartinThe first married couple canonized together, who buried four children and kept believing.
• Sts. Priscilla and AquilaTentmakers, hosts, teachers: the New Testament’s model marriage worked as a team.