St. Paul

Who they were

Saul of Tarsus was a Pharisee's Pharisee, educated under the era's great rabbi, zealous enough to hold the cloaks at Stephen's stoning and to ride for Damascus with arrest warrants, until the road to Damascus became the permanent name for what happened on it: the light, the fall, the voice asking why do you persecute me, and three days blind.

What the Church got from that reversal is unquantifiable. Three missionary journeys across the Roman world on foot and by ship, churches planted from Antioch to Greece, and the letters, which are the earliest documents in the New Testament, written before any Gospel, including the hymn to love read at half the world's weddings. He worked leather and canvas to pay his own way, took the beatings and shipwrecks he catalogues matter of factly in his second letter to Corinth, and was beheaded at Rome under Nero. His feast is kept with Peter's on 29 June, the two pillars together, and his Conversion has its own feast on 25 January.

Why people turn to St. Paul

Everyone whose life turned on a single day they did not choose. Writers who work a trade to fund the real work have an exact patron, since he made tents. Some who live with chronic illness claim his thorn in the flesh.

How to ask their intercession

On 25 January especially: for the person you have decided is beyond conversion, Paul being the standing proof that the Church's worst enemy became its greatest missionary.