Patron Saint of Children

Several saints, each for a different part of a child’s life, and none of them by formal decree:

• St. Nicholas of Myra (December 6), for children in general, and above all children in danger. The Catholic Encyclopedia lists him as patron of “mariners, merchants, bakers, travellers, children”.
• St. Gerard Majella (October 16), a Redemptorist lay brother who died in 1755, for expectant mothers, childbirth and babies in the womb. The story told of him: months before he died he dropped his handkerchief in a house he visited, and when a girl of the family ran after him with it he told her to keep it, since she might need it one day. Years later, in danger in childbirth, she asked for it, and gave birth safely. By his beatification process he was known as the saint of happy childbirths. He was canonised in 1904.
• The Holy Innocents (December 28), the boys of Bethlehem killed by Herod, for children who have died, and for their parents.
• St. John Bosco (January 31), the nineteenth-century priest of Turin who took in boys from the streets, for young people and teenagers.
• Every child’s guardian angel. Jesus says of children, “in heaven their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 18:10), and the Catechism: “From infancy to death human life is surrounded by their watchful care and intercession” (CCC 336). Their feast is October 2, the feast of the Guardian Angels.

Yes, and he has been for a very long time. But the Catholic Encyclopedia is blunt: “there is scarcely anything historically certain about him except that he was Bishop of Myra in the fourth century.” Whether he sat at the Council of Nicaea in 325 is uncertain: the Catholic Encyclopedia doubted it because his name is missing from the old lists of bishops there, though one sixth-century list does include him. The dowries and the three children raised to life are legend. What is history is the devotion itself, which by the sixth century had a church in Constantinople and by 1087 had carried his relics to Bari.

The legends agree on one thing, and it is the reason for the patronage: a bishop who stepped in for the young people nobody else would protect.

For a son or daughter who has gone off the rails, parents have long turned to St. Monica. Her son was Augustine, who spent his twenties in a religious sect she hated and a life she grieved over, and she prayed and wept for him for years. He tells the story himself in the Confessions. She begged a bishop to talk her son round; he refused, and finally, worn down by her tears, told her: “Go your way, and God bless you, for it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.” She took it, Augustine writes, as a voice from heaven. He became a bishop, a Doctor of the Church, and a saint. Her memorial is August 27, the day before his.

St. John Bosco is asked for the same need, especially for teenage boys: his life’s work was the young people the rest of Turin had given up on.

For a child in hospital, a child with a fever at two in the morning, a long illness or a frightening test result. Keep the medical care going; the prayer goes with it, not instead of it.

For parents after a miscarriage, a stillbirth or the death of a child of any age, and for the grandparents and brothers and sisters. The Holy Innocents are the Church’s own saints for this, and Scripture does not hurry past the grief: “Rachel weeping for her children; she wouldn’t be comforted, because they are no more” (Matthew 2:18). If the grief has become unbearable, or you are thinking of harming yourself, please reach out now.

The oldest way is the name. At Baptism, the Catechism says, a child may be given the name of a saint, and “the patron saint provides a model of charity; we are assured of his intercession” (CCC 2156). Families who keep the name day, the feast of the saint a child is named after, give the child a second birthday that points somewhere.

The rest is ordinary. The Catechism gives parents “the mission of teaching their children to pray” (CCC 2226). Tell the saint’s story at bedtime, keep a picture by the bed, say one line to them in night prayers. Children understand friends in heaven more easily than adults do.