Patron saint of marriage

Every marriage is a vocation, and no couple walks it alone. The Church gives husbands and wives a whole company of saints who were married themselves, who prayed for their spouses, or who watched over lovers and engaged couples for centuries. First among them is the couple who raised the Son of God.

St. Joseph and the Virgin Mary, the holy spouses

The patron saints of marriage are first of all St. Joseph and the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Gospel calls Joseph "a just man" and tells how, when an angel spoke to him in a dream, he "took unto him his wife." Theirs was a true marriage, though a virginal one, and inside it the Holy Family lived its hidden years at Nazareth: work, prayer, worry over a lost child in the Temple, and in the end, tradition says, Joseph's death in the arms of Jesus and Mary.

We ask Mary and Joseph to pray for married couples because they knew what every couple learns. They had to trust each other when things made no sense, they moved house in a hurry, and they put the good of their child first. Many parishes once kept a feast of the Espousals of Mary and Joseph on January 23, and couples still entrust their marriages to them on their wedding day.

Sts. Joachim and Anne, the grandparents of Jesus

St. Joachim and St. Anne are the Virgin Mary's parents in the Church's ancient tradition. Scripture doesn't name them; their story comes from the 2nd-century Protoevangelium of James, which the Church has never treated as Scripture but whose picture of this couple has shaped Christian devotion. Childless and grieving, they prayed apart, Joachim in the wilderness and Anne in her garden, until angels told each of them that a child would come. Joachim hurried home, and the Protoevangelium says that Anne "ran and hung upon his neck."

That embrace at the city gate became one of the most loved scenes in Christian art. It is a picture of two spouses who suffered together and rejoiced together, and it is why couples, and especially those hoping for children, ask Joachim and Anne to pray for them. Their feast is July 26.

Sts. Louis and Zélie Martin, the first spouses canonized together

Sts. Louis and Zélie Martin were a watchmaker and a lacemaker in Alençon, Normandy, and the parents of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. They met on a bridge over the Sarthe in April 1858 and married three months later, at the town hall on the evening of July 12 and at midnight in the church of Notre-Dame. They had nine children and buried four of them. Zélie died of breast cancer in 1877; Louis lived on to give all five surviving daughters to religious life and died in 1894 after a long illness of mind and body.

On October 18, 2015, Pope Francis canonized them together, the first married couple raised to the altars in a single ceremony. In his homily he praised the way they lived "creating day by day an environment of faith and love which nurtured the vocations of their daughters." No pope has formally named them patrons, but married couples have made them their own. Their feast is July 12.

St. Valentine, patron of lovers: history and legend

St. Valentine was a real martyr, beheaded and buried beside the Via Flaminia north of Rome, probably in the late 3rd century. That much is history. The Catholic Encyclopedia notes that early records speak of a priest of Rome and a bishop of Terni, both buried on that road, who may have been one man.

The stories told about him today are another matter, and it is only honest to label them:

• The secret weddings. The popular tale that the emperor Claudius II forbade soldiers to marry and Valentine wed them in secret is legend. It appears in no early source.
• The note signed "from your Valentine." Also legend, a modern addition with no ancient or medieval witness.
• The healed girl. The old Roman Passion says Valentine restored the sight of a judge's blind daughter, and her whole household was baptized. This is traditional, written down a few centuries after his death.

His patronage of lovers began with English poetry of the 1380s, when Chaucer wrote of birds choosing their mates "on seynt Valentynes day." Within a century, "Valentine" meant a sweetheart. The patronage grew out of a custom, not out of his life, and the Church has blessed it anyway: every year near his feast, engaged couples make a promise of love before his relics at Terni. The prayer the Carmelites of Whitefriar Street in Dublin pray at his shrine, which asks him to intercede "for those men and women who are preparing for marriage," is on St. Valentine's page.

St. Rita and St. Monica, for marriages in trouble

Not every marriage is easy, and two of the saints most often asked to pray for married people had hard ones.

St. Rita of Cascia married young in the 1390s. The Roman Martyrology says she "patiently endured mistreatment by her violent husband, finally reconciling him with God." When Paolo was ambushed and killed in a family feud, she forgave his murderers publicly. She is the patron of difficult marriages and of impossible causes.

St. Monica was married to Patricius, a pagan in Roman North Africa whom her son Augustine described as "violent in anger." She waited and prayed, and Augustine records in the Confessions that "towards the end of his earthly existence" she won him over to God. He was baptized before he died in 371.

These saints teach patience and forgiveness. They do not teach anyone to stay in danger. If you or your children are not safe at home, the Church wants you safe first; then bring the rest to God, and to Rita.

A prayer for married couples

The Bible gives spouses their own prayer. On their wedding night, young Tobias and Sara rose and "prayed earnestly both together." Their words, in the Douay-Rheims translation (Tobit 8:7-10), can be prayed by any husband and wife:

Lord God of our father, may the heavens and the earth, and the sea, and the fountains, and the rivers, and all thy creatures that are in them, bless thee. Thou madest Adam of the slime of the earth, and gavest him Eve for a helper. And now, Lord, thou knowest, that not for fleshly lust do I take my sister to wife, but only for the love of posterity, in which thy name may be blessed for ever and ever. Sara also said: Have mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy on us, and let us grow old both together in health.

St. Joseph and Holy Mary, pray for every husband and wife tonight. Sts. Louis and Zélie, pray for our homes. For more, see the patron saints of families, mothers and fertility, and our full list of patron saints.