By Michelle Martin
Staff Writer

Thomas Craughwell was in the fifth grade when his teacher, Dominican Sister Patricia Thomas, called his mother in for a conference.

The problem, it seemed, was that young Tom knew more saint stories than she did.

“At the time, I didn’t really know what to make of it,” said Craughwell, now 45 and the author of “Saints for Every Occasion: 101 of Heaven’s Most Poweful Patrons” (Stampley Enterprises, $19.95). “Over the years, I came to realize it was a case of professional jealousy.”

But Sister Patricia, who taught him at St. Anthony School in Hawthorne, N.J., and the sisters who taught him at St. Alphonsus on the North Side of Chicago, where he started school, should have taken some responsibility for his interest in saints, Craughwell said.

“In the early ’60s, classroom libraries in parochial schools were pretty much nothing but books about the saints,” he said. “And the deaths of the martyrs were always gruesome and appealed to young boys.”

The sisters at St. Alphonsus, in particular, piqued his imagination with the stories they told about saints, all the way down to Sister Donata, who taught first grade both to Craughwell, and, about 50 years earlier, his grandmother.

Craughwell developed his interest in the saints through his academic career, spending four years doing doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on medieval literature, with a focus on the lives of the saints.

While he never finished his doctorate, the work did give him a good basis when he decided to write a book about saints that could be invoked for people stuggling through modern life.

To make it more relevant than so many of the saint books already on the market, Craughwell said, he wanted to convey a sense of the saints’ personalities—something modern readers might expect in an age of self-revelation on “Oprah” and other talk shows.

“One of the problems I have with most saint books is the personalities of the saints get sanitized and you don’t get a lot of their quirks,” he said. “And a lot of them were very quirky. I don’t think some of them would have been very easy to get along with or to live with.”

St. Benedict Joseph Labré, for example, an 18th century Frenchman, never bathed or changed his clothes, living life as a beggar after being turned down by several religious orders. It’s said that Labré eschewed personal hygiene as a penance, Craughwell said, “but one wonders whether it was a penance for him or the people next to him in church.”

Labré, who is included in the book under “Saints for Social Action,” now is considered the patron saint of homeless people.

Even a saint as popular and well-known as St. Francis of Assisi, memorialized in garden statues around the world and with a variety of religious orders and congregations to his name, was “a little inflexible,” Craughwell said.

When Francis decided to be poor, he meant it, deciding that neither he nor his followers should own any property. By the time he died, many Franciscans had churches and monasteries; only about a dozen followed Francis’ original instruction to beg for a place to sleep or find a small shack, Craughwell said. In the matter of clothing, Francis kept an old robe until it was patched beyond all recognition. To get him to accept a new one, one of his followers took the old one while he slept and left the new one in its place. Francis would either have to wear it or go naked, Craughwell said.

“And, remembering that Francis renounced his wealth by taking off his clothes in the public square and handing them to his father, there was some doubt as to what he would decide to do,” Craughwell said.

St. Francis of Assisi also is included as a “Saint for Social Action” in his role as patron of the environment.

The stories of saints’ strong personalities make them real—and make sense for visionary men and women.

“Anybody who wants to be innovative, anybody who would say they have a vision or an ideal has to cling to it,” Craughwell said, whether their vision is spiritual or as secular as that of Bill Gates. “It will drive some people away and attract others.”

Craughwell’s personal favorite saint, other than the Blessed Virgin Mary, is St. Thomas More, and not just because he’s a Thomas, too.

“I’ve always been fond of Thomas More, not only because he was courageous and extremely intelligent, but because he was married and had children and was a devoted Catholic at the same time,” Craughwell said. “He showed that you don’t have to be a priest or a religious.”

Some of the newer patrons also strike Craughwell’s fancy, especially St. Joseph Cupertino, the 17th century Franciscan who became the patron saint of astronauts. Cupertino levitated and flew through the air. That must have looked much like an astronaut on a spacewalk, Craughwell imagined.

He also included St. Isidore of Seville, a seventh century Spanish bishop, as the patron for wholesome Web surfing. Isidore, it seems, created a 20-volume encyclopedia of all knowledge available to someone living in his time. While the Vatican has not declared him the patron of the Internet, it’s enough for techies around the world, Craughwell said, who see Isidore’s encyclopedia as the first database.

And it could inspire a new project for Craughwell: St. Isidore of Seville screen savers and mouse pads.