The Saints ­­—Who Are They?

Sunday after All Saints Day, 2025

Compiled by B.Todd Granger, Parish Catechist for Adults

In the Apostles’ Creed, recited whenever we say Morning or Evening Prayer and at baptisms, we confess our belief in “the communion of saints.” We celebrate the first day of November, and often the Sunday following, as the feast of All Saints. Who are the saints?

As Anglicans, we answer this question as we would any other question regarding the Christian faith: by turning first to the Bible and then to the Church’s faithful biblical interpretation through the centuries, which is known as catholic (or holy) Tradition. In his letters, St. Paul refers to the members of the churches to whom he writes as “saints”. The writer of the epistle to the Hebrews does the same, as St. Luke does in the book of Acts and St. John in the book of Revelation. They are doing nothing more than following the example of the Old Testament, in which faithful Israel, the people of God, are called saints (e.g., 2 Chronicles 6:41; Psalm 85:8). As our catechism, To Be A Christian, states: “The saints are those in heaven and on earth who have faith in Christ, are set apart to God in Christ, are made holy by his grace, and live faithfully in him and for him.” All the baptized people of God are saints—you and I are saints!

But what about those whom we single out as Saints, like St. Paul and St. Luke and St. Francis of Assisi? Is there something different about them? Do they receive more grace than we, or did they achieve a greater degree of holiness than we could ever achieve? No—and all of them would emphatically agree with that answer. We should understand instead that those whom the Church has specially and historically called Saints are examples to us of holiness of life, of courage in proclaiming the Gospel, and of compassion in ministering to the least of Christ’s brethren. But their holiness and courage and compassion and faithfulness weren’t achieved through their own efforts. They were entirely due to the transforming grace of God in Jesus Christ. The Saints are examples to all of us of how to give oneself entirely to God through his grace and, through that same grace, how to be conformed more and more to the image of Christ. The saints weren’t perfect. Jerome, a priest who translated the Bible into Latin in the fourth century so that the people of Rome and Western Europe would have a good text they could understand, was infamous for his bad temper. Thomas Cranmer, the sixteenth century archbishop of Canterbury who was largely responsible for the Book of Common Prayer and for reforming the Church of England, vacillated between his earlier Gospel faithfulness and his recantation of his reforms under persecution at the end of his life. But as simul justus et peccator, a Latin phrase used by Martin Luther to emphasize the paradoxical existence of Christians as both righteous and sinners at the same time, as both sinful people and as saints—righteous ones—through the merits of Jesus Christ, these saints are examples to us of faithfulness and of joy in living out the Gospel.

Our catechism teaches that “the communion of the saints is the fellowship of all those, in heaven and on earth, who are united in Christ as one Body, though one Spirit, in Holy Baptism.” When we come together on the Lord’s Day, our worship on earth participates in the eternal worship of the Church in heaven, as the saints on earth join the saints in heaven in their ceaseless praise of the Triune God.

The saints in heaven pray for us. Some Protestants hesitate at this, thinking that we’re moving back toward invoking the saints in the way Christians did before the time of the Reformation. To be sure, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, a foundational document (called a “Formulary”) for Anglicans, state that the invocation of saints “is a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture” (Article XXII). This rightly means that we cannot call upon the saints to pray for us as though they were heavenly intermediaries between us and God, for there is only one Mediator between all humanity and God, Jesus Christ (1 Timothy 2:5-6). But through the ages the Church, in part because of Jewish belief that the prophets continued after death to interecede for the people of Israel and because of the picture of the saints offering prayer in heaven (Revelation 8:3-4), discerned that the saints in heaven continue—as a manifestation of the communion of saints—to pray for the saints on earth, much as we pray for one another here on earth. In one of his sermons for All Saints’ Day, nineteenth-century English priest and poet John Keble (†1866), says:

All such, being more in number than could in any wise be commemorated separately, the Church has gathered into one feast, wherein, while we devoutly praise God for them on earth, we may piously hope that they remember us and pray for us in paradise.

Though we may not call upon them as mediators, we may be sure that our prayers, offered to God through the one Mediator, Jesus Christ, are joined to the prayers of the saints at rest, our examples and forebears in the faith.

Of the saints whom we remember in our Litany today, some need no introduction: St. Mary the Virgin, mother of our Lord; St. Joseph, his foster father; St. John the Baptist, our Lord’s cousin, forerunner, and baptizer; the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob) and prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, etc.); St. Peter the Apostle and St. Paul the Apostle (the latter whom the resurrected and ascended Jesus called after the other apostles, “the Twelve”); and the Evangelists: St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke, and St. John. St. Michael is one of two angels named in the canonical Scriptures, where he is called “the great prince” (Daniel 12:1) and “the archangel” (Jude 9); and as the leader of the holy angels fights against Satan, the dragon (Revelation 12:7).

Concerning the others, perhaps not so well-known (the year of death, of their “heavenly birthday,” is given, followed by the date in the calendar on which each is commemorated):

Agnes of Rome (†304, January 21): As a child of twelve or thirteen years, Agnes suffered for her faith, in Rome, during the persecution of the emperor Diocletian, the last and fiercest of the persecutions of Christians by the imperial state. Intensely dedicated to Christ, her fifth century Acts tell that she refused arranged marriage, saying that she preferred even the death of the body to the end of her consecrated virginity. After rejecting the blandishments of her examiners, and withstanding the threats and torments of her executioner, she remained firm in her refusal to offer worship to the gods of the imperial state, and was executed by being pierced through the neck with a sword.

Alexander Crummel (†1898, September 10): Born in Boston in 1819 to a former slave and a free woman of color, he struggled against racism and bigotry all his life. He received his theological education in Massachusetts and was ordained to the diaconate in 1842 and to the presbyterate in 1844 by the Bishop of Delaware. He soon found that there was “little scope in that diocese for black priests.” In 1844 he established a small mission in Philadelphia where he became involved in the politics of the abolitionist movement. In 1845, he became minister of the Church of the Messiah in Brooklyn, New York. In 1847 Crummel traveled to England, where he spent two years raising funds to support his congregation in Brooklyn. In 1849, he matriculated at Queen’s College, Cambridge University. While in Britain, he traveled around the country, speaking out about slavery (which had been abolished in the United Kingdom in 1833) and the plight of black people. After receiving a degree in 1853 (he was the first black student to graduate from Cambridge), Crummell went to Liberia as a missionary for the Protestant Episcopal Church, with the stated aim of converting native Africans there to Christianity. He labored in Liberia for twenty years, working unsuccessfully to establish a society that combined Western education and technology with traditional African communal values, undergirded by the Christian teachings of a national episcopal Church headed by a black bishop. On his return to the United States, he was called as pastor of an African-American mission in Washington, DC and in 1875, he and his congregation founded St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, the first black Episcopal church in the city that was not part of a predominantly white parish. Crummell served as rector of St. Luke’s until his retirement in 1894 and then taught at Howard University until 1897. He concentrated his efforts during his years in Washington City on establishing a strong urban presence of independent black congregations that would be centers of worship, education, and social service.

William White (†1836, July 17): Born in Philadelphia in 1747 he received his education at the college of that city, graduating in 1765. In 1770 he went to England and was ordained deacon and priest. On his return home, he became assistant minister of the United Christ Church and St Peter’s in Philadelphia, serving from 1772 to 1779 and serving as rector from the latter year until his death in 1836. He also served as chaplain of the Continental Congress from 1777 to 1789 and then of the United States Senate until 1800. Chosen unanimously as the first bishop of Pennsylvania in 1786, he traveled again to England for his consecration with Samuel Provoost, bishop-elect of New York. The two men were consecrated in the chapel of Lambeth Palace on Septuagesima Sunday, 1787, by the archbishops of Canterbury and of York and the bishops of Bath and Wells and of Peterborough. White was the chief architect of the Constitution of the Protestant Episcopal Church. He was chosen as the Church’s first Presiding Bishop at the inaugural General Convention in 1789 and again in 1795, serving in that office until his death. A wise overseer of the Church’s corporate life during its first generation, endowed with gifts of statesmanship and reconciling moderation, White was also a theologian of no mean ability.

Henry Budd (†1875, April 2): John West, a priest of the Church of England and chaplain of the Hudson’s Bay Company in Rupert’s Land, arrived in the Red River Settlement in 1820 to work as the first Protestant minister in that territory. West and George Harbridge, a schoolmaster, early on took charge of the education of Henry Budd, a young native orphan boy. Budd was baptized in 1822 along with the young son of a local chief. West’s register from this time has this entry: “Henry Budd an Indian boy about ten years of age taught in the Missionary School and now capable of reading the New Testament and repeating the Church of England Catechism correctly.” Budd went on to become the first person of First Nations ancestry ordained to the presbyterate in the Church of England in Canada. He ministered almost entirely among the people of the First Nations and was a fluent and powerful preacher in the Cree language. He also wrote well in both Cree and English. He was methodical and thrifty in the administration of the missions that he superintended, particularly important traits at a time when the Church Missionary Society paid a native missionary only half the stipend that a European missionary was paid. Among his enduring contributions are his work toward translating the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer into the Cree language.

Alcuin of York (†804, May 20): Born in Northumberland around 735 into a noble family related to Willibrord, the first missionary to the Frisians, Alcuin (Old English Ealhwine) was educated at the cathedral school in York under Egbert, archbishop of York and a pupil of Bede the Venerable. Ordained a deacon in 770, he then became the head of the school at York. Under Ælberht, bishop and then archbishop of York, Alcuin visited Rome and the Frankish court and helped to create a library at Yorkminster where he served as librarian and Master of the Schools. Following a meeting in 781 with Charlemagne in Pavia, the Frankish king persuaded him to join the court scholars at Aachen and to serve as his chief minister, with special responsibility for reviving education and learning in the Frankish dominions. Alcuin withdrew from court life in 796 to become abbot of Saint Martin’s at Tours, where he died on May 19, 804. Alcuin was man of vast learning, integrity, and personal charm. In his direction of Charlemagne’s palace school at Aachen, he was primarily responsible for the preservation of the classical heritage of European civilization. Under his direction and influence, schools were revived and established in cathedrals and monasteries, and manuscripts both pagan and Christian from classical antiquity were collated and copied. His own writings include biblical exegesis; a major theological work on the Trinity; moral and philosophical essays; manuals of grammar, rhetoric, orthography, and mathematics; and poems on a wide variety of subjects. Under Charlemagne’s authority, Alcuin also led the Carolingian liturgical reform.

Clive Staples (C. S.) Lewis (†1963, November 29): Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1898, Lewis’s father was a prominent barrister and his mother a mathematician. He entered University College, Oxford in 1917 and was Tutor and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1954, when he was appointed Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge. Lewis was raised an Anglican but rejected Christianity during his adolescence. His journey from atheism led him to theism in a conversion experience in 1929 and from there to faith in Jesus Christ, sealed on September 22, 1931, when with his brother Warren he received Holy Communion for the first time since boyhood. He described his gradual conversion in a book, Surprised by Joy, written in 1948 but not published until 1955. Lewis writes about his initial conversion experience: “I gave in, and admitted that God was God…perhaps that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” His conversion led to an outpouring of Christian apologetics in popular theology, among which are The Problem of Pain (1940), The Screwtape Letters (1942), Mere Christianity (1943), Miracles (1947), Reflections on the Psalms (1958), Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964); the seven-part Chronicles of Narnia; science fiction novels; and correspondence on spiritual matters with friends and strangers alike. In 1956 he married Joy Davidman Gresham, who had recently converted from Judaism to Christianity. Her death four years later led him to a transforming encounter with the Mystery of whom he had written so eloquently before and which he explored in A Grief Observed (1961), a classic expression of sorrow and Christian hope. Lewis died at his home in Oxford on November 22, 1963. Lewis’s deep scholarship, clarity, and rapier wit made him perhaps the most effective and persuasive Christian apologist of the twentieth century.

Dominic (†1221, August 8): Domingo Guzman was the youngest of four children of the warden of Calaruega in the kingdom of Castile. He received his education from his uncle, the archpriest of Gumiel d’Izan, and later at Palencia. During this time he became an Augustinian canon of the cathedral church of Osma. In 1201 he became prior of the community of canons at Osma. In 1204, returning from an embassy to Denmark, Dominic and his bishop began a mission to convert the Albigensian heretics at Toulouse in southern France. The Albigensians, later known as Cathars, were a medieval sect who taught that the material world was evil, and that Jesus had come only in spirit, not in the flesh. Catharism was not a single organized heretical sect but a variegated movement of believers who generally emphasized simplicity and austerity of life on the basis of heterodox or outright heretical understandings of Scripture and who rejected the sacraments and ministry of the medieval Western Church. The austerity and devotion of the Albigensians was in stark contrast to the laxity and voluptuousness of some of the Catholic clergy of the time, and the movement became popular in the Languedoc and in Provence. The conversion of the Albigensians and their reconciliation to the Church was to become a primary element of Dominic’s ministry. Three times he refused a bishopric, believing that God had called him to this work instead. He began by established religious communities of women who lived lives as simple and austere as the Albigensians. He also established communities of preachers that were the foundation of the Friars Preachers, the Ordo Praedicatorum, or Order of Preachers, known after their founder as the Dominicans. Dominic’s plan was to provide communities which were centers of sacred learning, whose members would be devoted to study, teaching, and preaching as well as to prayer. He retained the Divine Office (the seven hours of daily prayer), but it was chanted more simply and expeditiously by the Friars Preachers than by monks. The Dominican ideal was the training of men whose contemplation would bear fruit in the communication of the Word of God. The Order of Preachers soon spread all over western Europe and became a pioneering missionary force in Asia and later in the Americas. Dominic’s preaching against the Albigensian heresy seems to have met with only limited success, but his foundation of communities dedicated to sacred learning and sound teaching fulfilled an acutely felt need in the medieval Church. The subsequent work of the great medieval theologians Albert Magnus and Thomas Aquinas represented the fulfillment of Dominic’s ideals.

Scholastica (†c.543, February 10): Sister of Benedict, the Abbot of Monte Cassino and father of Western monasticism, she too was born at Nursia in central Italy, around the year 480. At an early age she consecrated her life to God, but probably remained at home. After Benedict moved to Monte Cassino, she settled about five miles distant at Plombariola, either joining or founding a convent there. As abbess of Plombariola, she followed Benedict’s monastic Rule. Scholastica and Benedict met once a year in a house near his monastery, where they would praise God together and discuss spiritual matters. At their last meeting, she asked him to stay longer to “keep on talking about the joys of heaven until morning,” but he refused, protesting that he could not stay away from his monastery. At his refusal, she folded her hands on the table and rested her head on them in prayer. The effect of her prayer was a violent thunderstorm that prevented Benedict’s leaving, and they spent the night together as she had wished, from which “both of them derived great profit from the holy converse they had about the interior life.” Three days later Scholastica died, and as Benedict stood in his room looking up toward the sky, he saw his sister’s soul leaving her body in the form of a dove and entering into heaven. After giving joyful thanks to God his sister’s eternal glory, he sent several of the brethren of his monastery to bring her body back to Monte Cassino, where she was buried in the tomb that Benedict had prepared for himself. Upon his death, he was laid in the tomb next to her.

Lesslie Newbigin (†1998, January 29): Born in England, Newbigin was educated at the University of Cambridge, where he was brought to Christian faith through the ministry of the British Student Christian Movement. In 1936 he was ordained by the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian) for missionary work in India. He served as a village evangelist (1936-1947), as an architect and interpreter of the Church of South India (CSI), a church that united Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Methodists. He was consecrated as one of the first bishops of the united church, serving in Madurai from 1947 to 1959. From 1959 until 1965, he served in the International Missionary Council and then in the World Council of Churches, a body that he subsequently came to criticize for its political stances and movement away from evangelism. He then returned to India to serve as bishop of Madras in the Church of South India until 1974. During his postretirement years in England, he served as professor of ecumenics and theology of mission at Selly Oak Colleges in Birmingham (1974-1979), as moderator of the United Reformed Church (1978-1979), and as pastor of a small inner city United Reformed congregation in Birmingham (1979-1989). In 1982 he organized the Gospel and Our Culture group to explore the form of Christian mission to a largely dechristianized Britain. Newbigin was preeminent as a theologian passionately devoted to the mission and unity of the church. The influence of his thought and style is found in countless reports he wrote or edited, in articles, sermons, and biblical studies throughout his career, and in his books, especially The Household of God (1953) and The Open Secret: Sketches for a Missionary Theology (1978, 1995). At the same time, engagement of Christian faith with the worldviews of modern society was his constant theme. His Honest Religion for Secular Man (1966) foreshadowed the substantive theology and social analysis of his later works, Foolishness to the Greeks (1986) and The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989).

Jerome (†420, September 30): Eusebius Hieronymus Sophonius, more commonly called Jerome (the Anglicized form of Hieronymus), was born about the year 345 in Strido, a village near the city of Aquilea in northeastern Italy. He came from a moderately well-to-do Christian family. He studied in Rome under the renowned grammarian Donatus and acquired a considerable reputation as a rhetorician. He was baptized in late adolescence or early adulthood, sometime before 366. After several years spent traveling through the Western Roman Empire in Gaul, Dalmatia, and Italy, he settled in 374 in the city of Antioch, then one of the greatest cities of the Roman world, whose bishop was the Patriarch “of all the East.” There he continued his studies, but when he succumbed to a serious illness from which two of his companions had died, he had a dream in which God condemned him for being “a Ciceronian, not a Christian,” too concerned with the pagan classics. He then withdrew to the desert near Antioch to live as a hermit, where he gave up the classics he had hitherto studied and knew and loved so well, learning Hebrew in order to study the Old Testament in its original language. After a few years spent in Rome where he harshly criticized the luxurious and scandalous life of some members of the Christian upper class and even of some of the clergy and fostered a growing ascetic movement among the upper class women of Rome. In 396 he established himself in a monastery near the basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where he opened a school for boys; translated a number of historical, philosophical, and theological works into Latin; and began his greatest work: the translation into an elegant and simple Latin of the Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek texts, a translation known as the Vulgate (having been translated into the “vulgar” tongue, the language of the common people) that remained the standard Latin version for the next sixteen centuries.

John Calvin (†1564, May 27): Born in 1509 in Noyon, France, Jean Cauvin was raised in a staunchly Roman Catholic family. The local bishop employed Calvin’s father as an administrator in the town’s cathedral. His father wanted John to become a priest. At the age of 14, Calvin went to Paris to study at the College de Marche in preparation for university study and later transferred to the more famous College Montaigu. While in Paris he changed his name to its Latin form, Ioannis Calvinus, which in French became Jean Calvin. By 1527, he had developed friendships with individuals who were reform-minded, which set the stage for his eventual switch to the Reformed faith. On his father’s advice, he moved to Orleans in 1528 to study civil law, during which time he received a humanist education. In 1533, Calvin experienced the sudden and unexpected conversion that he writes about in his foreword to his commentary on the Psalms. Over the next three years, he studied on his own, preached, and began work on his first edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, which he dedicated to the king of France (the work was an instant best seller). He settled in Geneva in 1536, serving as a lecturer and preacher, and left for Strassburg in 1538 to serve as pastor to the French Protestant refugee church there. He returned to Geneva in 1541 at the city council’s request to become the pastor of the Cathedral Church of St. Pierre. The first fourteen years of his pastorate were marked by varying degrees of resistance to his ecclesiastical and moral agenda for the city. In 1559, he published the fifth and final edition of the Institutes and founded the Geneva Academy, with a private school for elementary instruction and a public school offering more advanced studies in biblical languages and theology to train ministers, lawyers, and teachers. Calvin dispatched French-speaking pastors whom he had trained for the ministry from Geneva to other French-speaking regions in Europe. All told, some thirteen hundred Geneva-trained missionaries went to France, and pastors trained at the Geneva Academy were also sent to establish and to pastor Reformed churches in Italy, Hungary and Transylvania, Poland and Lithuania, the Rhineland, the Netherlands, Scotland, and even as far as Portuguese Brazil. In early 1564, Calvin became seriously ill. He preached for the last time from the pulpit of St. Pierre on Sunday, February 6. He died on in 1564, and at his request, he was buried in the common cemetery in an unmarked grave.

Hannah More (†1833, September 7): Born near Bristol, England in 1745, Hannah was the fourth of five daughters of Jacob More, a schoolmaster from a strongly Presbyterian family of Norfolk who had joined the Church of England. Hannah attended a girls’ boarding school in Bristol that her father founded and for a few years in early adulthood taught at the school. In the winter of 1773-1774, she made the first of many trips to London with two of her sisters. When in London, More sought association with such literary, artistic, and political elites as Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, and Edmund Burke. Johnson, who at first scolded her for her flattering attempts to make his acquaintance, would later call her “the finest versifatrix in the English language.” She attended the salon of Elizabeth Montagu, the British social reformer, patron of the arts, salonnière, literary critic and writer, who helped to organize and lead the Blue Stockings Society, a group of women who engaged in conversation and literary and intellectual pursuits. One of her plays was performed to acclaim at Covent Garden in 1777 and was revived by the actress Sarah Siddons in 1785 in Drury Lane. After the death of the actor David Garrick in 1779, More devoted herself increasingly to religious activities, and through the 1780s her circle widened to include leading religious and philanthropic figures, including William Wilberforce, Beilby Porteus (the Bishop of London), and John Newton, all of whom were early leaders in the abolitionist cause. More contributed much to the running of the newly founded Abolition Society and promoted the abolitionist cause through such writings as “Slavery, a Poem” (1788). Her relationship with members of the Society, especially Wilberforce, was close. Newton, the Evangelical Anglican priest and supporter of abolition who had been converted to Christ while engaged in the Africa slave trade (which conversion formed the basis of his hymn, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound”), became her spiritual advisor. By the mid-1790s, she had become closely involved with the Evangelical “Clapham Sect,” to which belonged many early leaders of Evangelical Anglicanism, a number of whom were also involved in the campaign to abolish the slave trade and slavery itself. Under Wilberforce’s influence, beginning in the 1780s she and her sister Martha founded several schools in Somerset for the children (boys and girls) of destitute families, at a time when such schemes for popular education were almost unprecedented. The curriculum of these schools combined religious education with what is now known as vocational training (such as spinning), designed to lift the students out of poverty by teaching them a trade. Although suffering from ill health in advanced age, she continued to write religious and moral treatises and to support philanthropic and religious causes into her advanced age, both in the United Kingdom and abroad. In 1820 she donated money to Philander Chase, the first Protestant Episcopal bishop of Ohio, toward the foundation of Kenyon College. She died in 1833 in Bristol.

Lydia: was the Apostle Paul’s first convert to faith in Christ in Europe. A native of Thyatira in Asia Minor, in the ancient region known as Lydia, she resided in the city of Philippi in Macedonia. She was a merchant of goods dyed with the purple-red dye known as Tyrian purple, so-called because it was first extracted by the Phoenicians. Tyrian purple was extracted from the Murex sea snail and was highly prized in antiquity because it did not fade but became more vibrant and intense with weathering and exposure to sunlight. The Romans considered the dye a mark of high status: the stripe on the toga of a senator was dyed with Tyrian purple, and its use in the emperor’s toga led to its being known as “imperial purple”. The dye was all the more costly because of the difficulty of extraction. Dealing in purple-dyed goods would require a good deal of capital, so Lydia was likely wealthy. When the Apostle Paul first met her, she was one of a group of women who met outside the city of Philippi for prayer on the Sabbath, and Luke notes that she was a “worshiper of God” (Acts 16:14), suggesting that she was one of those Gentiles who kept some of the Jewish ethical and liturgical customs (including synagogue worship) without fully converting to Judaism. According to the Acts of the Apostles, “the Lord opened her heart to pay attention” to Paul’s preaching that Sabbath, and she and her household were baptized. After this she prevailed on Paul and his companions to stay in her house, thus relieving him of the necessity of earning his support, as was his custom elsewhere. Although Lydia does not appear in any of Saint Paul’s extant epistles, his love for the church at Philippi is evident in his letter to that church, a love that doubtless began with Lydia’s hospitality.

Dorcas: also called Tabitha (Dorcas means “gazelle” in Greek and Tabitha in Aramaic) was a believer who lived in Joppa. She was known there for her good works and acts of charity, including the making of tunics and other garments for the widows of the church. When she died, the members of the church at Joppa sent messengers to the Apostle Peter, asking him to come to them without delay. On his arrival in the upper room where Dorcas had been laid, he “knelt down and prayed; and turning to the body he said, ‘Tabitha, arise’” (Acts 9:40), whereupon she was restored to life. This was the first such miracle by one of the apostles, and because of it “many believed in the Lord”. In the Acts of the Apostles Dorcas is called a “disciple” in a feminine form of the word that in the New Testament is applied only to her. Dorcas Societies, which provide clothing and other material needs for the poor, were named for her. The original society was founded in Douglas, Isle of Man in 1834 in thanksgiving for deliverance from a cholera outbreak, and to replace the bedding and clothing of the poor that had been destroyed as part of the effort to prevent an epidemic.

Phoebe: whose name means “bright” or “radiant”, was a diakonos of the church at Cenchreae, the eastern seaport of Corinth. In his letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul commends Phoebe to the church at Rome, that they might “welcome her in the Lord in a way worthy of the saints, and help her in whatever she may need from you, for she has been a patron of many, and of myself as well” (16:1,2). Many New Testament scholars and church historians believe that the application of the word diakonos to Phoebe, along with 1 Timothy 3:11 (which in Greek reads, “and also the women”, rather than “their [deacons’] wives” as in a number of English translations), is evidence that the early Church ordained women to the same diaconate to which men were ordained. Phoebe was clearly a person of influence and faithfulness, given that Saint Paul entrusted his letter to the Romans to her.

More can be read about these and other saints commemorated in the calendar of the Anglican Church of North America in the weblog, For All the Saints (https://forallsaints.wordpress.com/).