St. Stanislaus Kostka

Who they were

Stanislaus Kostka was a Polish senator's son sent to the Jesuit college in Vienna, where his early piety earned him his older brother Paul's sustained abuse, mockery and beatings in their shared lodgings. Gravely ill and denied a priest by their Lutheran landlord, the boy reported receiving Communion from angelic hands and recovering.

What is beyond dispute is what he did next. Refused admission to the Society in Vienna for fear of his father's rage, the seventeen year old walked out of the city in a pilgrim's rough clothes and covered some four hundred and fifty miles to Dillingen, his brother's pursuit failing to recognize the beggar on the road. St. Peter Canisius tested him there, judged the metal true, and sent him on to Rome, where Francis Borgia received him into the novitiate. He lived ten months of documented, luminous ordinariness, and in August 1568, healthy, he remarked that he would die on the Assumption, and did, at seventeen. His brother Paul spent the rest of his life repenting of the abuse, and petitioned in old age to enter the Jesuits himself.

Why people turn to St. Stanislaus Kostka

Teenagers whose faith or calling their own family fights, with St. Kateri Tekakwitha and St. José Sánchez del Río. Novices and seminarians, formally. And older brothers and sisters who know they have been the Paul in the story; his ends well.

How to ask their intercession

With a young person facing the family fight, ask for the Stanislaus combination specifically: no hatred toward the one opposing them, and no surrender of the call either.