St. Rafael Arnáiz Barón

Who they were

Rafael Arnaiz was a gifted, cheerful architecture student from Burgos, sketching and joking and devout, who at twenty two entered the Trappist monastery of San Isidro de Duenas, the strictest life Spain offered.

Four months in, severe diabetes erupted, and the disease dictated the rest. Too ill for the community's fasts and labour, he was sent home, and came back. And was sent home again, and came back. Four entrances in all, and he was finally accepted not as a professed monk but as an oblate, the monastery's lowest and least secure standing, which he embraced with open eyes as his actual vocation: to be God's fool, belonging wholly while possessing no status at all. Through the upheavals of the Spanish civil war and the scarcities that made his condition unmanageable, he kept his notebooks, published after his death as some of the twentieth century's most disarming spiritual writing, boyish and piercing at once. He died of his diabetes at the monastery in April 1938, at twenty six.

Why people turn to St. Rafael Arnáiz Barón

People with diabetes, which millions live with, and his prayers belong alongside the insulin and the endocrinologist rather than instead of them. Young adults whose chronic illness keeps rewriting their plans. And everyone whose vocation keeps getting interrupted, since his four returns are the patronage. He completes the young adult shelf with Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati and St. Carlo Acutis.

How to ask their intercession

At the diagnosis, at the regimen's daily grind, and at the plan's third revision. Ask his prayers for his signature grace: belonging wholly to God from an unofficial position.