St. Peter

Who they were

Simon of Bethsaida ran a fishing operation on the Sea of Galilee, with boats, partners, and a mother in law whose house became the Capernaum base, and everything the Gospels record about him rings like a real man: first out of the boat, first to answer, first to get it spectacularly wrong.

He is the disciple who walked on the water and sank, who confessed you are the Christ and was renamed Rock in the same scene where he earned get behind me, and who, on the worst night, denied three times by a fire that he knew the man at all, then went out and wept. The Gospel of John refuses to end without repairing it: on another shore, over another fire, the risen Christ asks him three times, once for each denial, do you love me, and gives him the flock. Peter led the Church from Jerusalem to Antioch to Rome, where the persecution of Nero took him. The tradition that he asked to be crucified upside down, unworthy to die as his Lord did, is ancient. His bones lie beneath the high altar of the basilica bearing his name.

Why people turn to St. Peter

The whole Church, structurally. But the personal devotion belongs to everyone rebuilding after a failure they cannot take back. The keys were given after the denial, and that order of events is the entire consolation.

How to ask their intercession

After the failure, use his restoration as the template: answer you know that I love you three times, and take the work back up. Fishermen and everyone who works the water hold the oldest claim on him.