How did you find your Patron Saint?

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So years ago I was in this situation where I could have been SERIOUSLY harmed but at the time I was randomly stung by a dead bee. Yes, a dead bee. LOL! I don’t even quite know how it happened but the sting redirected my path and changed the course of the night and… I believe, saved my life (won’t go into too much more as it would leave the thread completely overwhelmed). As an aside I was not seriously harmed by the bee… it just kind of snapped me out of something I shouldn’t have been doing. Kind of like someone had given me a slap across the face to say: WAKE UP!

Later I was led to read up about Saint Ambrose and apparently bees are something he’s attached to. At the time I just had this feeling that he had intervened to help me. I wasn’t even Catholic yet! I just kind of knew.

Now I have never been assigned a patron saint and at my confirmation there was no mention of saints but I kind of feel like he may have intervened for me and that I may have my patron in Saint Ambrose.

How did you know who your patron was?

What can you tell me about what exactly a patron saint is… what we are allowed to believe about them and what we do with them? Because this part I’m struggling to understand as my RCIA class never discussed this and I’ve had a difficult time finding reliable/trustworthy information on it.

PS: Google is a scary place! HAHA. Amazing how much new-age stuff comes up when you search for information about angels or saints.
 
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I thought you had to take a name at your confirmation? Am I wrong?
I would look first to your first name, middle name, and confirmation name for your patron. Naming is a powerful thing.
But, in the long run, you can adopt any saint for your patron. A patron is a person who supports you; our patron saints support and accompany us spiritually. The best method is praying to your patron and getting to know them. If they have a tomb or shrine somewhere, make a pilgrimage.
 
None of that happened at our confirmation. When I tried the name method I was led to a saint who apparently normally is the patron of priests. Haha. That didn’t seem right. Maybe I did it wrong!

Oh interesting about the tomb/shrine thing. Thank you!
 
You can pick any patron saint you want.
You can have more than one.
They’re just special saints you feel close to and pray to frequently, for their intercession with God.
Often people like to read about their patron saints or think about “what would my patron saint do”.
it’s really up to the person.

I have about a dozen of them. 2 of them were my parents’ patron saints and I kind of took them over as a way of staying close to my parents, who have both died. 1 is my confirmation saint and 1 was not my name saint but has a similar name and a nun in the hospital thought I was named for her because her feast day was a few days before I was born.

1 is a saint who my husband said he liked, probably to just shut me up because I was nagging him to choose a saint and he was Protestant, but the one he picked happened to be a saint that is popular in USA and in my own family, so I adopted him. 1 is a saint who came up for this year in the random saint chooser web page and turned out to be pretty apropos. 1 is a saint I was reading about one day and then out of the blue I went to another saint’s shrine and found a holy card of this saint I’d been reading about, just laying around on a podium (the saint does not have any connection with the shrine and is fairly obscure so it was a weird coincidence). There are several more, plus a handful of people who aren’t canonized yet but are on the path at different stages.

Sometimes saints “choose” you by getting your attention in some way. It sounds like maybe St. Ambrose chose you.
 
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Thanks! A dozen! Holy! That’s really interesting. I want to get more into involving the saints in my prayer life as it’s not something I have really done yet. But there’s this whole deposit of Christians who can help me pray so why not utilize them you know?

I was just really curious about the patron saint thing as I just know nothing about it!!!

Learning it’s attached to our name makes me curious. What if you weren’t named after one?
 
I actually pray to many, many saints besides just my patrons because I really like to read about saints and I do devotions where you add a saint a day to your “Holy Alliance” and ask the whole Alliance to pray with you.

It used to be that all Catholic children were expected to be named for a saint and they wouldn’t baptize you otherwise. Nowadays that’s kind of gone by the wayside. But you get to pick a saint for confirmation, and you can also look up saints who might have a similar name to your own, or the same root or meaning for the name but in a different language.

My father was a Protestant convert and was not named for any saint. He just picked his own patron saint when he got baptized and confirmed.
 
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<3 Your dad and I have something in common. 🙂
I’m thinking I’ll definitely name my kids after a saint. 😃
 
I spent over five months trying to discern my Confirmation Saint. I was one day curious about who the patron Saint of the Templar Order was, and discovered the very cool and underappreciated St. Bernard of Clairvaux. After I read about him, I just knew that he was the one. 😛
 
I’m not terribly comfortable revealing that considering all the stuff I’ve shared. I’m just a little worried if someone from my parish logs in they’d recognize me. (recognize me based on the stories I’ve shared and because I’m the only one in my parish with my name. 🙂 )

I will say there are no saints with the same name (feminine version anyway). I used this ‘find your saint using your name’ program online once and it led me to the priest saint. Haha. I think because he had the masculine version of my name.
 
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My grandfather used the church calendar to name his children, hence why I had an aunt named Edwarda (born on the feast day of St. Edward). When I learned more about my namesake saint, I realized he had had a strong influence in my life. Yes, names are very influential.
 
You could also consider the saint whose feast is on your birthday.
 
If you are referring to my mom and dad and the nursery … It’s Robert (I take it for Bellarmine)
 
For Confirmation, I chose St. Luke, because his Gospel is such an inspiration to me. It contains teachings of the Lord that aren’t in any of the other Gospel narratives, including some of the ones I really love like the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.

I also like The Acts of the Apostles, which is really the second half of Luke’s chronicle, and the story of the early Church, Pentecost and Peter speaking to the crowds in Jerusalem.
 
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