NOTES: Saints Behaving Badly by Thomas J. Craughwell

Saints Behaving Badly: The Cutthroats… (Doubleday, 2006)

p. 5 St. Jude, the enormously popular patron saint of lost causes, is on record as speaking only once and very briefly in the gospels.

p. 9 1961, The Hoodlum Priest, ??

p. 15 Callixtus's brief five-year reign [as pope] was marked by the virtue he had come to appreciate above all others: mercy.

p. 25 [Sts. Ursula and Catherine of Alexandria apocryphal characters?]

p. 37 In the final scene of a play called Laureolus the actor who had been cast as the title character was replaced by a condemned criminal who was tortured to death, onstage, in full view of the excited audience.

p. 63 It is interesting to note that this [i.e., St. Patrick's evangelization of Ireland] was not the first time a slave had introduced Christianity to a remote land. Christianity came to Ethiopia with St. Frumentius, a onetime slave to the king of Ethiopia, while St. Nino, a slave woman, was the mother of the Church in what is today the Republic of Georgia.

p. 67 If anything reveals the depth of Patrick's attachment to his converts it is the blistering letter he wrote to Coroticus, a Christian British prince who raided a Christian Irish community, killing many and carrying off the survivors to sell as slaves.

p. 80 [St. Columba went to a funeral for a man who had been killed by a large creature in Loch Ness, and while another man was swimming in the water, the monster emerged to attack the swimmer, but Columba chastised the monster with the sign of the cross and it retreated.]

p. 88 The Russians and Ukrainians venerate her [St. Olga, former mega-homicidal widow] as "the first from Rus to enter the kingdom of God," giving her the title "Equal to the Apostles…".

p. 136 Previously [in Xn hx] a local saint was likely to be a conscientious bishop or a dutiful abbot of a Benedictine monastery…. In the case of female saints, they also came from the upper ranks of society…. A thirteenth-century saint, however, was likely to come from the new middle class….

p. 142 [St. Ignatius of Loyola's eldest brother, Juan,] sailed with Columbus on the explorer's second voyage to the New World, where he died in battle against the Indians.

p. 144 [St. Ignatius's only reading materials during his recuperation were] a life of Christ written by Ludolph the Carthusian and Jacobus de Voragine's collection of saints' lives, The Golden Legend.

p. 171 "I call God to witness it is no small grief unto me that I cannot make recompense in this world for the wrongs I have done you [my wife]; for if it had pleased God to have granted me longer life, I doubt not but that you should have found me as good a husband … by his grace, as you have found me bad before … [God] knows that which is past is a nail in my conscience." [–– St. Philip Howard, to his wife, before he died of dysentery in prison under Queen Elizabeth I]