St. Matthias

Who they were

Matthias holds the strangest job description in the New Testament. He replaced Judas.

Acts gives the whole scene. Peter stands among a hundred and twenty and sets the criterion: the replacement must have been a witness of everything from the baptism of John until the ascension, which means Matthias had been there all along, faithful and unchosen through the entire public ministry. Two names go forward, they pray, and the lot falls to Matthias. He enters the Twelve bearing the seat's history and is never individually mentioned again. Tradition sends him to Judea or the Caucasus and gives him a martyr's death, and an old and tender tradition makes him a patron invoked against alcoholism. What Scripture certifies is the shape of the vocation: years of unrecorded fidelity, then the call to fill the hardest vacancy imaginable, taken without a recorded word of protest.

Why people turn to St. Matthias

Everyone stepping into a role with a shadow over it: the successor after the scandal, the replacement hire, the person taking over what someone else's failure left behind. The long faithful and never noticed, with James the Less. And those in recovery, by the old tradition.

How to ask their intercession

On accepting the vacancy: he took the seat and simply did the work. Ask for that, plus the method in Acts, which is to pray first and decide second.