June Saints Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Franks

St. Clotilde (475-545) was a princess of Burgundy, and was raised in the Catholic faith by her parents. When she became Clovis's bride at the age of 18, she devoted herself to his soul, using all her persuasive powers to bring him to the faith of her childhood. When he came to Christ in the year 496 (according to legend, he converted in the midst of a battle), he had already united the Frankish tribes and had begun to conquer France. Although it took some time for Christianity to become fully accepted among the Franks, his new religion worked out well for him: when he became a Catholic instead of an Arian, it made the Pope his ally in his wars against those other Germanic tribes that subscribed to Arian beliefs.

After Clovis's death in 511, St. Clotilde went into the cloister, but never really left the world until her death; as the mother and grandmother of kings and princes, politics was too dear to her heart.

Answer: An Ethiopian eunuch

St. Philip the Deacon gets his title from his first appearance in the Bible: in Acts 6:3-5, he was one of the "seven men of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom" named to be a deacon, looking after the needs of the fledgling congregation. Later, he went on the road, preaching the Gospel in city after city; it was on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza that he encountered the Ethiopian eunuch, a servant of that country's queen. The eunuch was puzzling over a passage from Isaiah, and asked St. Philip if he knew its meaning. "Then Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus" (Acts 8:35) and the eunuch, deeply moved, asked to be baptized. It was just after the baptism that St. Philip was more literally moved, all the way to Azotus or Ashdod.

St. Philip is thought to have stayed a while in Caesarea, preaching, before (according to tradition) becoming a bishop in what is now Turkey.

Answer: Iona

Iona is a small island, just three and a half square miles (or nine square kilometers). After an ugly dispute with another future saint over a psalm-book -- leading to a pitched battle and the deaths of thousands of men -- St. Columba left Ireland to avoid excommunication, vowing to bring Christianity to the Picts in order to atone for the evil his pride had wrought. In the year 563, a local lord gave him land on Iona for his mission, and so he built his abbey there and made it home.

St. Columba quickly developed a reputation as a holy man, and was as much in demand as a diplomat as he was as a priest. His abbey at Iona was a celebrated scholarly center and school for evangelists, and gained a reputation as a singularly holy place; more than fifty kings of various lands arranged to be buried there, including the historical Macbeth.

Answer: Franciscans

The Order of Friars Minor follows the Rule of St. Francis, which focuses on poverty, simplicity, and humility. This lifestyle appealed greatly to the young St. Anthony of Padua, who was an Augustinian when he met his first Franciscans; after that group of monks was martyred in Morocco, St. Anthony was moved to continue their work. After consultation with his superiors, he left his order to become a Franciscan, became a hermit in Italy after a shipwreck, and finally found a gift for preaching after a miscommunication left a nearby monastery without anyone to give the sermon.

Once his oratorical talents were discovered, St. Anthony put them to work by traveling through France and Italy, teaching the Gospel wherever he went. "Happy the man whose words issue from the Holy Spirit and not from himself!" he preached in one sermon, and few doubted that he spoke from personal experience. He died young, at the age of only 36, but has become a deeply beloved saint and Doctor of the Church.

Answer: St. Vitus' dance

Little is known of the historical St. Vitus, who died in the year 303 at the age of about 12. He is said to have been a senator's son, raised to honor the ancient Roman gods but converted to Christianity by his tutor and nanny, Saints Modestus and Crescentia. When their religion was discovered, all three were martyred in boiling oil (after a few false starts). Impressive miracles were reported before and during their deaths: angels freed them from prison, lions refused to eat them, and sudden storms destroyed ancient temples as they died.

In central Europe, medieval Catholics adopted a custom of dancing for St. Vitus on June 15; he was said to intercede for his dancers, giving them good health for a year. It was this wild, seemingly uncontrolled dancing that gave rise to the term "St. Vitus' dance" for chorea minor, whose sufferers experience uncontrollable, irregular muscle contractions that resemble dance moves.

Answer: His name was confused with that of Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus.

Several of Jesus's apostles shared names with each other; for example, there were two who were named James, one a son of Zebedee and the other a son of Alphaeus. It was St. Jude's bad luck to share his name with Judas Iscariot: Luke 6:16 even lists them next to each other, as "Judas the brother of James, and Judas Iscariot, which also was the traitor." (Other Gospels refer to St. Jude as Thaddaeus or Lebbaeus, perhaps to avoid this very confusion.) Early Christians apparently sometimes confused the two men; others doubtless knew the difference, but were nervous as to what others would say if they were heard praying to "St. Judas." Only the very desperate would take such a chance!

As time went by, St. Jude thus ironically became one of the better-known saints, for his patronage of lost causes and desperate situations and for his status as a saint of last resort.

Answer: Plague sufferers

St. Aloysius (1568-1591) had poor health even as a boy, stemming from a kidney ailment he picked up at the age of eight. Far from being bowed by his illness, however, he famously treated it as a blessing: his sickness gave him time to pray, and saved him from the life at court and at war that his noble family expected him to follow. Giving up all his claims on his family's wealth, St. Aloysius joined the Jesuit order as soon as he was able, hoping to become a priest.

When he was still a novice, however, there was a plague in Rome, and St. Aloysius volunteered to help tend the victims -- despite his fragile health and the worries of his superiors. He died three months later, weakened by the plague but fearless in his confidence that he was going to God. He is believed to look after victims of all plagues, not only the type that killed him; in recent years, victims of AIDS were added to his purview.

Answer: St. Thomas More

St. Thomas More (1478-1535) was a learned man whose work still echoes through modern society. His "History of King Richard III" may not have been entirely accurate, but -- in influencing Shakespeare's famous play about that king -- it has shaped the modern perception of that time in history. His famous novel, "Utopia," gave us the word for a perfect society and founded a popular literary form. He rose to become the first Lord Chancellor of England who was not also a member of the clergy.

But, in 1530, as King Henry VIII of England began to take steps to separate the country from the Catholic Church in order to annul his marriage to the Queen, St. Thomas More's star began to fall. He would not take oaths saying that the Pope was not the rightful head of the Church in England; he would not take oaths supporting the King's divorce. In 1535, he was convicted of treason, and he was martyred five days later. As he climbed the steps to the scaffold to be beheaded, he is said to have shown remarkable bravery and humor, saying, "I pray you, Mr Lieutenant, see me safe up and for my coming down, I can shift for myself."

It is a testament to the saint's reputation as a good and decent man that he is regarded as a saint not only by the Roman Catholic Church, but also by the Church of England whose founding he opposed.

Answer: A rising tide separated her from her husband -- and it did not go down again for a week.

St. Etheldreda, who lived from about 636 until 679, was fortunate in her first marriage: her husband willingly agreed to respect her desire to remain a virgin. Her second husband, the King of Northumbria, did not take her decision so well -- especially when she made it official by becoming a nun. When he pursued her, she escaped with two friends. When she seemed trapped between him and the sea, a high tide separated the king and queen -- and it stayed high for seven days. With God and nature opposed to him, the Northumbrian monarch gave up, leaving St. Etheldreda free to go her own way.

In the Middle Ages, a fair in her honor grew up in Ely, where she had founded an abbey. Inspired by her famous modesty, and especially by her regret for the pride she used to take in necklaces, merchants at St. Audrey's fair specialized in modest lace neckerchiefs. In later centuries, as the lace fell out of fashion (and, perhaps, as it fell off in workmanship), the phrase "St. Audrey" (a familiar form of Etheldreda) gave rise to the word "tawdry."

The incorrect answer choices were inspired by other virgin martyrs. Heavenly music was the forte of St. Cecilia, a Roman; it is said to have comforted her during her wedding ceremony (she later persuaded the groom to take a vow of celibacy himself) and during her later execution. St. Winifred, a Welshwoman, was murdered by a suitor who would not take no for an answer; fortunately, her saintly uncle was able to help restore her to life, and she lived happily for many years afterward -- even becoming an abbess. St. Barbara, a Roman whose historical existence has come into doubt, was briefly saved from her pagan father's deadly wrath by being miraculously transported to a mountain some distance away.

Answer: Peter

The Catholic Church honors thousands of canonized saints, and very few of them have faces that are universally recognizable (especially after centuries of varying artistic interpretations). To solve this problem, artists usually show each saint with some unique attribute or accessory, setting them apart by their surroundings instead of by their faces.

St. Peter's association with keys comes from a famous passage in the Gospel of Matthew. After St. Peter (still going by the name of Simon) told Jesus that he believed Him to be the son of God, Jesus honored him: "And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven" (Matthew 16:18-19). Roman Catholics believe that St. Peter thereby became the first pope, the leader of the Church and the rock upon which it was built, and that all later popes have been his successors. In religious art, he is usually shown holding at least one key, symbolizing his authority.

St. Paul, who is usually shown with a sword, was a contemporary of St. Peter but converted to Christianity much later, after spending much of his life persecuting Christians under the name of Saul. After receiving a vision of Jesus Christ while on the road to Damascus, he became a fervent Christian, and his letters on theology and practice (which form a significant part of the New Testament) have profoundly shaped Christian thought (both in the Catholic Church and in other churches).

Both men, evangelists and theologians who changed their names in the service of Christ, were martyred in Rome at about the same time, in AD 62.

Thank you for joining me in this look at the saints of June! I hope you've enjoyed this page of the calendar.