The friends of God, at length.
A life apiece, at the length it deserves — the feast, the dates, what they actually did, what they left behind, and the prayers proper to them. Each page ends with where that saint turns up elsewhere in this library, because a saint is not a separate subject: they are the thread running through the prayers, the novenas, the gallery and the sacred texts.
Saint Ann
Feast — 26 July · First centuryThe mother of the Blessed Virgin and the grandmother of Christ — of whom scripture says nothing whatever, and about whom the Church has never stopped talking.
Saint Catherine of Siena
Feast — 29 April · 1347–1380A dyer’s daughter with no schooling who told popes what to do, dictated one of the great books of Christian mysticism, and was dead at thirty-three.
Saint Alphonsus Liguori
Feast — 1 August · 1696–1787A Neapolitan lawyer who lost one case, left the bar, and spent the next sixty years arguing that God is easier to approach than the theologians of his day were letting on.
What is here and what is not.
These are short lives, not hagiography: where the record is thin it says so, and where a famous saying is probably not the saint’s it says that too. The prayers are the traditional ones where genuine traditional texts exist, and are credited on each page; the rest were written for this collection.
More will be added. If you are looking for a novena rather than a life, they are gathered at the novenas.