Celebrating April Saints

The E-Team invites you to visit their tables in the Gathering Space and among other materials we have shared there you will find four new prayer cards for Saints that we honor during the month of April.

April 4 is the feast day of a 7th century saint who strangely was chosen as the patron saint of our modern-day internet. Why him? After careful examination of his life, St. Isidore of Seville turns out to be the perfect choice. Isidore (not to be confused with St. Isadore the Farmer) was the Archbishop of Seville and he was a great scholar whose encyclopedic knowledge was far reaching.

St. Gemma Galgani, is the patron saint of students and others. She taught valuable lessons about faith during her brief lifetime (from 1878 - 1903 in Italy). One of those lessons is how guardian angels can give people wise guidance for every aspect of their lives.  We celebrate her feast day on April 11. Her prayer is for forgiveness of our sins.

We celebrate Saint Mark’s feast day on April 25 th . His life and Gospel remind us to share the Good News about Jesus with others; to Evangelize. When we read his gospel, we learn that to be a follower of Jesus, we too must be willing to make sacrifices to “take up the cross”. The symbol for Mark is a lion with wings. That is because his Gospel begins with the story of John the Baptist, a “voice crying in the wilderness” (Mark 1:3), like a roaring lion. Lions are called the kings of the jungle. Mark’s Gospel tells us about Jesus’ royalty as God’s Son, a kingship we share through our Baptism.

St. Catherine of Sienna was the youngest of 25 children born to a lower middle-class family; most of her siblings did not survive childhood. She was declared a doctor of the church in 1970 and she is a patron saint of nurses. She died on April 29, 1380, and thus we celebrate her feast day each April 29.

The E-Team