St. Olaf

Who they were

Olaf Haraldsson was, before anything else, a Viking: a teenage raider along the English and Frankish coasts, baptized at Rouen in the middle of that career. He took Norway's crown in 1015 and set about making the country Christian and unified.

His methods were his era's, and the sagas do not hide them: law backed by force, idols broken, resisters punished. Modern eyes flinch, and should. His own countrymen drove him out. He fell at Stiklestad in 1030 trying to come back, and then came the reversal history cannot fully explain. Within a year the king they had rejected was venerated as a martyr, his shrine at Nidaros became the great pilgrimage of the North, and Norway titled him Rex Perpetuus Norvegiae, its eternal king. He is the patron not of his methods but of what he was in the middle of becoming: a rough man being remade, unfinished when he died, finished in mercy.

Why people turn to St. Olaf

Scandinavian heritage families. And rough men in the middle of conversion, with St. Moses the Black and St. Camillus de Lellis, which is a shelf that recovery ministries recognize on sight.

How to ask their intercession

For the unfinished man you know, or are. The prayer here is for the remaking, not for the record to look better than it was.