Saints that Pull Double Duty

The Fourteen Holy Helpers

We have a subscription to the Great Signature Courses offered by our cable company.

In the time we have had it, our family has enjoyed courses on topics like “Train Your Brain,” “The Cathedrals,” and learning more about historic people like St. Augustine as well as programs on health and well-being.

These courses were especially appreciated during the time when the world was shut down, and one, in particular, was very enlightening.

“Black Death: The World’s Most Dangerous Plague” is an approximate 20-episode course covering not only the Plague that enveloped Europe from 1347–1355 but some of the other pandemic disasters recorded from the mid-first millennium.

Generally speaking, the Bubonic Plague, also called Black Death and the Great Mortality, ravaged Europe for eight years. The human death toll still is the greatest in history — some 75–200 million souls or about 30% of Europe’s population.

With numbers like this, the Plague affected people from all levels of the socio-economic spectrum, and so swiftly was the course of this illness that a person could wake up in the early morning and be deceased by noon.

Medical science could not help. Governments could not intervene with any degree of success. Business and trade continued as best they could under the circumstances.

So what happens when people come to the point of frustration and desperation when none of their own devices are solving the problem?

Ah, yes, they turn to God.

In one episode of this course, Dr. Dorsey Armstrong, who has a Ph.D. in Medieval Literature from Duke University and is the lecturer in the series, points out that even the Church was ineffectual in Its handling of the scourge.

Clerics, she said, in many cases refused to provide services or perform their duties. In one instance, the people from Messina petitioned the Patriarch of Catania in Sicily to have the relics of St. Agatha…

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