Saints for hard times: 11 to turn to when life breaks
Patron saints for hopeless causes, anxiety, illness, addiction and grief, and the true stories of how each one earned the title.
The MySavior teamUpdated · 9 min read
The LORD is near to the brokenhearted; He saves the contrite in spirit.
Psalm 34:18 · BSB
The prayer of a righteous man has great power to prevail.
From James 5:16 · BSB
The saints most Christians turn to in hard times are Jude and Rita for hopeless and impossible causes, Dymphna for anxiety and mental illness, Peregrine for cancer, Maximilian Kolbe for addiction, and Monica and Elizabeth Ann Seton for family sorrow and grief. None of them got the job by accident. Each one lived through some version of the trouble people now bring to them.
That is the comfort of the saints. They are not marble figures who never struggled. One was locked in a ward for the insane. One gambled away everything he owned. One buried a husband and two daughters. They prayed through it, and Catholics and Orthodox Christians still ask them to pray alongside us, the way you would ask a friend who has been there.
Here are eleven of them, with what each is a patron of, the day the Church remembers them, and the story behind the title.
Asking a saint to pray for you is not a substitute for a doctor, a counselor or a recovery program. If you are thinking of ending your life, please tell someone today; in the US you can call or text 988, day or night.
Hopeless causes · October 28
Saint Jude
Jude, also called Thaddeus, was one of the Twelve, the one John’s Gospel is careful to call “Judas (not Iscariot).” No one knows for certain how he became the saint of desperate cases. An old explanation is that his name sounded too much like the betrayer’s, so few people prayed to him, and he was left for those who had tried everyone else.
In America, devotion grew after the Claretians opened the National Shrine of St. Jude in Chicago in 1929. A struggling actor, Danny Thomas, vowed to build Jude a shrine if he ever found success. In 1962 he founded St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis.
Impossible causes · May 22
Saint Rita of Cascia
Rita was married young, in the hills of Umbria, to a man remembered as violent and bad-tempered. She stayed eighteen years. Then he was murdered in a feud, and at his funeral she forgave his killers. When her two sons talked of revenge, she prayed they would be kept from it. Within a year both had died of illness.
The convent in Cascia would not take her until she had made peace between the families. Leo XIII canonized her in 1900 as the patroness of impossible causes. Widows and women in abusive marriages pray to her too.
Mental illness and anxiety · May 15
Saint Dymphna
Tradition says Dymphna was the daughter of an Irish king who, after her mother died, wanted to marry her. She fled with an old priest to Geel, in what is now Belgium, where her father found her and killed her. She was about fifteen. The story was first written down six centuries later, so treat the details gently.
What came after is history. By 1480 so many pilgrims with troubled minds were coming to her shrine that its lodgings had to be enlarged, and in time the townspeople took them into their own homes. Geel’s families still do. Dymphna is the patron of people living with mental illness, and many ask her help with anxiety or depression. Her feast has long been May 15; the Roman Martyrology now lists May 30.
The mentally ill and the sick · March 8
Saint John of God
In 1537 a Portuguese former soldier heard John of Ávila preach in Granada and broke down in public so wildly that he was locked in the city hospital’s ward for the insane. Treatment there meant chains, whipping and hunger.
He came out determined that the sick poor would be cared for differently, and opened a house for them. His followers became the Brothers Hospitallers. He died in 1550 after jumping into a river to save a young man. He is a patron of hospitals, nurses, heart patients, the dying and the mentally ill.
Cancer and serious illness · May 1
Saint Peregrine Laziosi
At eighteen, Peregrine struck a priest across the face. Philip Benizi had come to Forlì to make peace between its factions, and he answered the blow with kindness. Peregrine repented and joined Benizi’s order, the Servites.
Around sixty, he had a wound in his right leg that tradition remembers as cancer, and the surgeon decided to amputate. The night before, he prayed before a painting of the crucified Christ and seemed to see Jesus come down and touch the leg. In the morning the doctor found no sign of the disease. People facing cancer and other grave illnesses have asked his prayers ever since.
The sick, and gamblers · July 14
Saint Camillus de Lellis
Camillus was a soldier with a leg wound that would not heal and a gambling habit that took everything he owned. A friar’s preaching turned him around in 1575, but the Capuchins would not accept him because of the leg.
So he went to work at San Giacomo, a hospital in Rome that had once thrown him out as a quarrelsome patient, and rose to run it. He founded the Camillians, who wear a red cross on their cassocks. He is a patron of the sick, hospitals and nurses, and is still invoked against gambling. In the United States his day is July 18.
Addiction and prisoners · August 14
Saint Maximilian Kolbe
Kolbe was a Polish Franciscan priest, prisoner 16670 at Auschwitz. At the end of July 1941, after a man escaped, the guards chose ten men to starve to death. One of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out for his wife and children. Kolbe stepped forward and asked to take his place.
He lasted two weeks in the starvation bunker and was killed by lethal injection on August 14. Gajowniczek survived the war and stood in Saint Peter’s Square when Kolbe was canonized in 1982. Kolbe is a patron of people fighting drug addiction, of prisoners and of families.
Worried parents, alcoholism · August 27
Saint Monica
Monica’s husband had a violent temper and was unfaithful. Her son Augustine was brilliant and lost, and once slipped away to Italy without telling her. She prayed for him for years. A bishop she begged for help sent her off with words Augustine later wrote down in his Confessions: “it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.”
Augustine was baptized in 387. Monica died at Ostia that same year, her prayer answered. She is the patron of difficult marriages, of parents whose children have walked away from the faith, and of people with alcoholism.
Grief and widowhood · January 4
Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton
Elizabeth Seton was a New York wife and mother of five when her husband’s business failed and tuberculosis wore him down. They sailed to Italy for a warmer climate, were held a month in quarantine at Livorno, and William died there in December 1803. She was twenty-nine.
She became a Catholic, founded the Sisters of Charity in Emmitsburg, Maryland, and later buried two teenage daughters. In 1975 she became the first saint born in the United States. Widows, and anyone carrying grief, can find a companion in her.
Survivors of slavery and trafficking · February 8
Saint Josephine Bakhita
She was seven or eight when slave traders seized her in Darfur, in 1877. The trauma took even her birth name; Bakhita, Arabic for “fortunate,” is what her captors called her. She was sold again and again, and one owner had 114 patterns cut into her skin. In 1889 an Italian court ruled that she had never legally been a slave.
She chose to stay in Italy, became a Canossian sister, and spent most of her life in the town of Schio, where people called her “Madre Moretta.” John Paul II canonized her in 2000. She is the patron of Sudan, and her feast is now the International Day of Prayer and Awareness Against Human Trafficking.
When God feels absent · September 5
Saint Teresa of Calcutta
The world knew her as the small nun who carried the dying in off the streets of Calcutta. Only after her death did her letters show what she carried inside: for nearly fifty years, with one short break, she felt that God was absent. She wrote of darkness and emptiness, asked that the letters be destroyed, and went on praying and working anyway.
She once wrote that if she ever became a saint, she would be a saint of darkness. Pope Francis canonized her in 2016. For anyone whose prayers seem to hit the ceiling, she is proof that faithfulness does not run on feelings.
On your iPhone
A saint for every day of the year
Hard seasons rarely end on schedule, and it helps to have company on the ordinary days in between. MySavior’s Saint of the Day widget puts one saint or feast on your Home Screen or Lock Screen for each day of the year, with a short biography in the app.
Nine of the eleven saints above have a day in its calendar, starting with Saint Jude and Saint Simon on October 28. You can browse the whole calendar on this site, month by month.
Sun 8 Blessed John Duns Scotus
9:41
Saint of the Day on your Home ScreenMySavior’s widget shows one saint or feast for each day of the year, on your Home Screen or Lock Screen, and changes by itself at midnight.
★ Rated 4.9 on the US App StoreLoved by Christians in 60+ countries8,000+ people every month
In your own words, or these
A prayer for when it is hard to pray
Saint Jude, Saint Rita, Saint Monica, and all you saints who knew sorrow from the inside: pray for me. You know what it is to wait, to lose, to be afraid. Ask the Lord to give me the next step, and the strength to take it. Amen.
Pray it slowly, and change the names to the saint whose story sounded most like yours. Then say plainly what you need. The saints are not a spare route around God; they are friends who pray with you to him.
A small practice for this week
Choose one saint from this list, the one whose trouble looks most like yours. Write their name on a card and keep it where you will see it each morning. Read their story once more, then ask them, in a single sentence, to pray for the one thing you are carrying. On their feast day, light a candle or go to Mass. And if the trouble is heavy, tell one living person about it too; the saints would want that.
Let a saint keep you company each day
Bible verse and prayer widgets you design yourself, a countdown to the feasts of the year, and a saint for every day.
★ Rated 4.9 on the US App StoreLoved by Christians in 60+ countries8,000+ people every month
Questions
Who is the patron saint of hopeless causes?
Saint Jude the Apostle, whose feast is October 28. Saint Rita of Cascia, whose feast is May 22, is the patroness of impossible causes; Leo XIII gave her that title when he canonized her in 1900.
Is there a patron saint of anxiety and depression?
Saint Dymphna is the patron of people living with mental illness, and many Catholics ask her help with anxiety and depression. Saint John of God, who was once confined in a ward for the insane, is also a patron of the mentally ill.
Who is the patron saint of addiction?
Saint Maximilian Kolbe is invoked for people fighting drug addiction, and Saint Monica is a patron of people with alcoholism. Saint Camillus de Lellis, a former gambler, is invoked against gambling.
Why do Christians ask saints to pray for them?
Catholics and Orthodox Christians ask the saints in heaven to pray for them, just as they would ask a friend on earth. They point to Revelation 5:8, where the elders hold “golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints.” Most Protestants pray to God alone but still honor the saints as examples. Bible quotations here are from the Berean Standard Bible (BSB).
