Do you know of a saint or saints who were not a religious or priest?

[Gottle_of_Geer]

Thanks heaps, Michael, for your contribution also! I know we have literally hundreds of saints who were lay people. Unfortunately all the sites I accessed had, most of them, literally hundreds and hundreds of saints…but no classification such as virgin and religious, martyr and priest, virgin and third order lay woman, wife and mother, single female, child, adolscent martyr…etc. etc. - something akin to this after their name would be helpful and just might be done hopefully at some future date at least on some sites…I hope. They may even exist already - just that I have never come across them.

Thanks again…all helps!..Barb

**Maybe such a site should be created **​

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**My info is mostly from the 1965 edition of the “Book of Saints” published by the monks of Ramsgate Abbey in England - I know of at least one further edition, published c. 1988. **

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**The categories are liturgical - with the exception of “adolescent”; I think it makes a difference whether a martyr is a 15-year old (like Ponticus, who was one of the martyrs of the persecution at Lyons in 177), or an otherwise ordinary housewife like Anne Line, who died in prison in 1601 for assisting a priest (with whom she is commemorated as one of the Forty Martyrs of England & Wales). Some of the Japanese martyrs are mere infants; but again, the liturgical categories obscure this. **

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I think this variety is important - because Saints are ordinary Christians to whom God grants an extraordinary measure of grace to which they are enabled to respond. They are not supermen. One of the worst mistakes we can make is to think that only people in religious orders, or clergy, or suchlike, can be Saints. Sanctity is within the reach of university professors, mothers, fathers, students, children, gardeners, all sorts: it is not a clerical or monastic preserve, for if it were, almost all the Church would be excluded from it. Which is to deny the holiness of the Church **

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One other complication: many saints fit into several categories, having been laity for a significant part of their Christian lives, then clergy or religious or both: St. Gregory Nazianzen the elder is the father of four Saints & the husband of another, & became a cleric only after being married. (He died at a great age, which may have helped ) One or two saints were religious, gave it up for good reasons, then married. So matters can be complicated.

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[BarbaraTherese]

[Quoting BarbaraTherese: **Maybe such a site should be created

Quoting Gottle of Geer:

**

**My info is mostly from the 1965 edition of the “Book of Saints” published by the monks of Ramsgate Abbey in England - I know of at least one further edition, published c. 1988. **

The categories are liturgical - with the exception of “adolescent”; I think it makes a difference whether a martyr is a 15-year old (like Ponticus, who was one of the martyrs of the persecution at Lyons in 177), or an otherwise ordinary housewife like Anne Line, who died in prison in 1601 for assisting a priest (with whom she is commemorated as one of the Forty Martyrs of England & Wales). Some of the Japanese martyrs are mere infants; but again, the liturgical categories obscure this. **
Thank you

**

I think this variety is important - because Saints are ordinary Christians to whom God grants an extraordinary measure of grace to which they are enabled to respond**

. They are not supermen. One of the worst mistakes we can make is to think that only people in religious orders, or clergy, or suchlike, can be Saints. Sanctity is within the reach of university professors, mothers, fathers, students, children, gardeners, all sorts: it is not a clerical or monastic preserve, for if it were, almost all the Church would be excluded from it. Which is to deny the holiness of the Church Thank you again. I think God grants sufficient Grace for all of us to become saints and no matter state of life…it is a question of our response to that Grace. **

**

One other complication: many saints fit into several categories, having been laity for a significant part of their Christian lives, then clergy or religious or both: St. Gregory Nazianzen the elder is the father of four Saints & the husband of another, & became a cleric only after being married. (He died at a great age, which may have helped ) One or two saints were religious, gave it up for good reasons, then married. So matters can be complicated.

**
St. Rita of Cascia is the same: wife and mother, religious, mystic.

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**Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts…Blessings and regards…Barb **