AmericanPapist Comments
Hold on a minute!!
Isn't every soul in Heaven considered a "Saint?"
One would hope that there are a lot more than 6882 who have made it to Heaven since God created the Heavens and the Earth . . .
OK . . . I get it, this database contains the ones who have been declared blessed or canonized by the Church . . .
Sounds like a great project, but the first name I looked up, Bl. Brother Andre of Montreal, contained a pretty significant error: his name was listed as Blessed Andrew . . .
Zach,
To clarify on Bl. Andre Bissette (and all other saints whose common name is not technically English), I translated all names uniformly from the Latin of the Roman Martyrology. So if a saint shows up as "Teresia" in the Martyrology, she becomes "Teresa" in the English database even if the commonly used name for her is "Teresa" or "Theresa" or "Therese." This way you can search for "Teresa" and find ALL Teresa's no matter what language of origin their names have. So Andre is the French equivalent to Andrew in English.
They don't have St. Emiliana, aunt of Pope St. Gregory the Great. That's my patron, my name is Emilianne I hae never been able to find a picture of her, though.
what a goldmine!!!!!!!!
Emily,
I did a check and St. Emiliana is in the database, but with the Latin spelling of her name with an "a" on the front: Aemiliana. I'll switch that around so the English spelling comes up first. I also translated all the saints named "Aemilia" as "Emily" in English. There's quite a few.
There is no one single "official" list of saints, given the popular or local canonizations of the first ten centuries, though the Roman Martyrology comes close. The Book of Saints compiled by the Benedictines of Ramsgate lists 10,000 and estimates the existence of another 10,000 not included, which means there are at least 20,000 saints venerated by the Church across the world; the Orthodox estimate about 30,000 for themselves, though at least some of those we share in common with them, and the rest may be due to their more decentralized canonization process.
Matthew,
Certainly the Roman Martyrology does not contain the name of every soul in heaven or even every person held up for veneration at every place and every time in the Church's history, but it does list all the people that the Church officially holds up for veneration (through the process of beatification and canonization). And it is official. The Vatican proposes no other list of saints for our veneration. The Roman Martyrology is the gold standard.
Wow Mark! what a project - good work with putting that together. This'll be an amazing resource for many people in the future .. and FINALLY I can see what saints have feast days on my birthday (even though the common calendars don't ever list one :P)
I do appreciate the work put into this. I appreciate it a lot. It's clearly going to have its uses.
But. Um. A lot of times, the Latinization is very, very approximate. For example, the Blessed Bishop Toirdhealbhach O'Brien comes up in the Latin as Terentius. Toirdhealbhach does not equal Terentius. The Roman style is on crack, there.
The other problem with the "only one spelling" rule is that you won't be able to find a saint unless you figure out what that one spelling is. Steven or Stephen?
"Oh, there's obviously no saints named Steven; my name isn't a saint's name after all."
Given the capabilities of a database, I would have thought that including every possible spelling would be the way to go... or at least making the search very fuzzy.
Shrug. Maybe once I get used to this barebones format, it will have its uses. But at present, I like the standard saint reference (as currently migrated to SQPN) a lot better.
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