Patron saint of firefighters

Firefighters run toward what everyone else runs from. It is no surprise that Christians have always looked for heavenly help with fire, and that the people who fight it have patrons of their own. The best known is a Roman official from the Danube frontier, painted on fire halls across Austria and Bavaria with a bucket in his hand. Here is who he was, who stands with him, and a prayer for the men and women who answer the call.

St. Florian, the patron saint of firefighters

St. Florian was a Roman official in the province of Noricum, in present-day Austria, during the persecution of Diocletian. His Passion, written in the 9th century and kept by the abbey that bears his name, says he had retired from service when he heard that Christians were being hunted at Lauriacum, near modern Enns. He went there himself. Meeting former comrades on the bridge, he told them, "Brothers and comrades, why look for others? I too am a Christian."

He was beaten and tortured. According to the Acta Sanctorum text quoted by the art historian Richard Stracke, he told the governor, "If you want to know why I do not fear your torments, light a fire, and in the name of my Lord Jesus Christ I will climb upon it." Instead the soldiers tied a large stone around his neck and threw him from the bridge into the Enns on May 4, 304. The Passion says the river laid his body on a rock, where an eagle guarded it; that part, like the spring that burst out on the way to his grave, is traditional.

Why he became the firefighters' saint

His life has no firefighting story, and his patronage grew from devotion rather than from any deed. The Acta Sanctorum noted that people had prayed to him against house fires "in every age," and charcoal burners, who worked with fire every day, took him as their patron. Stracke suggests that Florian's challenge to "light a fire" may lie behind it. By the late Middle Ages painters and carvers were showing him in armor, pouring a bucket of water over a burning house. The Christian Iconography site found no written source for the bucket story at all, which suggests the pictures came first; the image is traditional, and late.

In Poland, devotion grew after a fire in 1528 burned the Kraków district around his church but spared the church itself, a story reported in Polish tradition. Kraków had received a large part of his relics in 1184. Today the image of Florian with his bucket marks fire stations throughout Austria and Bavaria, and his feast, May 4, is kept as a solemnity in Upper Austria, with the province's fire service represented at the abbey Mass.

Other patron saints of firefighters

St. Barbara

St. Barbara is a virgin martyr known only from legend: her pagan father shut her in a tower, she became a Christian, and he beheaded her himself, after which he was struck by lightning. The Catholic Encyclopedia explains that this "caused her, probably, to be regarded by the common people as the patron saint in time of danger from thunder-storms and fire." From there she became the patron of artillerymen and miners, whose work involves sudden blasts, and of firefighters. Her story is traditional, and her feast was dropped from the General Roman Calendar in 1969, but gunners, miners and firefighters still keep December 4.

The Catholic Encyclopedia also tells of Henry Kock, a man nearly burned to death in a fire at Gorkum in the Netherlands in 1448, who called on Barbara and lived long enough to receive the last sacraments. That rescue is reported, and it spread her cult widely.

St. John of God

St. John of God, the founder of the Brothers Hospitallers, is a patron of firefighters for a deed that is plain history. In July 1549 fire broke out in Granada's Royal Hospital. John ran in, carried and led out the sick, threw bedding and furniture from the windows, and came out of the flames unhurt. That no one died and that he passed through the fire untouched is how the Office of his feast later remembered it. His feast is March 8.

Saints invoked against fire

Others on the cards above are asked to protect homes and cities from fire. St. Agatha is the protector of Catania: tradition says that a year after her martyrdom, when lava from Mount Etna poured toward the city, the people held up the veil from her tomb and the fire stopped. St. Catherine of Siena is invoked against fire too, though the origin of that patronage is unclear. St. Nicholas of Tolentino is said to have put out a fire in the Doge's palace in Venice by throwing blessed bread into the flames, a story that is traditional. St. Lawrence, who died on a gridiron, is sometimes named online, but his traditional patronages are deacons, the poor and cooks.

A prayer for firefighters

The prayer most firefighters know was written by Richard Cardinal Cushing, Archbishop of Boston, and is printed by Catholic Culture. It opens, "Dear God, Through the intercession of our patron, Saint Florian, have mercy on the souls of our comrades who have made the supreme sacrifice in the performance of their duty." The full text is on St. Florian's page.

We can also pray the promise God gave through the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 43:2, Douay-Rheims):

When thou shalt pass through the waters, I will be with thee, and the rivers shall not cover thee: when thou shalt walk in the fire, thou shalt not be burnt, and the flames shall not burn in thee.

Let us ask St. Florian to pray for every firefighter on duty tonight, for their families waiting at home, and for those who never came back. More causes are on our patron saints page.