St. Athanasius

Who they were

Athanasius was a young deacon at the Council of Nicaea in 325 when the Church defined that the Son is of the same being as the Father, against Arius's more comfortable theology of a created Christ. He then spent five decades as that definition's most stubborn defender while the political winds reversed.

As Patriarch of Alexandria he was exiled five times by four emperors, seventeen years in banishment altogether, hiding among the desert monks, governing his see by letter, and at one point standing as the nearly solitary voice among compromised bishops, which gave the language its phrase, Athanasius against the world. He used the exiles well. His On the Incarnation remains a doorway book to the whole faith, and his Life of Antony, written about his friend St. Anthony the Abbot, invented monastic biography and converted readers for a thousand years. He died in his bed in Alexandria in 373, in possession of his see, the argument won.

Why people turn to St. Athanasius

Anyone holding an unpopular truth at personal cost and losing count of the reversals. He is the long version of that fight, where Thomas More is the short one.

How to ask their intercession

For endurance specifically, rather than for winning, since he did not live inside the winning for most of it. One decade offered for the person outnumbered in your world.