It has recently come to my attention that my religion has produced a saint who was a dog.

In the late 1200s, an inquisitor in Lyon kept hearing about the people of the town making pilgrimages to the resting place of a local saint named St. Guinefort, who was considered by the locals to be a patron saint of sick children. The inquisitor had never heard of St. Guinefort before, but he let it slide for awhile; after all, up until the late 12th/early 13th century that’s pretty much how sainthood worked. The locals adored you after your death, they added you to the local Calendar of Saints, they built up cults around you, and tales of your saintly nature spread far and wide, perhaps all the way to Rome. Eventually, though, curiosity got the better of the inquisitor and he started asking around. (It was sort of implicit in the job title, after all.) It wasn’t too long after chatting people up about how Guinefort got his reputation for holiness that one of the locals cheerfully informed the inquisitor that Guinefort was a greyhound.

Apparently, St. Guinefort was left by his owner (a feudal lord) to watch over the baby. When the lord returned, he saw Guinefort lying next to the crib covered in blood. The lord immediately drew his bow and shot the dog through the heart. A second later, however, the baby started crying, and the lord looked down to see the remains of a bloody dead snake at his feet. Only then did he realize that he had martyred his poor dog. So he interred the pious pooch in a well and planted a grove over him, and people had pretty much been taking their sick kids to the grove ever since so that St. Guinefort would save them, too.

(What saving a baby from a snake has to do with Jesus, exactly, you’ll have to ask the 13th century Celts.)

The inquisitor said the 13th century equivalent of, “well, that’s some bullshit right there,” cut down the grove, burned the wood, and then dug up the dog’s rotting corpse and burned that too, declaring the dog a posthumous heretic. (If you’re thinking to yourself right now, “Am I the only one who finds it hilarious that, while a dog can’t be named a saint, it apparently can be named a heretic?” the answer to your question is “no.”) Despite all of the burning and dog corpse name calling, however, the locals continued to visit the grave site and pray to the greyhound for intervention well into the 1930s. The 1930s from the century you were born in.

This was sorta the way things went with your earlier saints. People squawk a lot about the spooky, bureaucratic hierarchy of the Catholic Church, but history seems to suggest that without it, you pretty much end up with St. Scruffy.

In the course of his lively discussion of dog saints and dogfaced saints who may not have existed (St. Christopher supposedly had a dog’s face; oh, and a number of your earlier saints didn’t, in the strictest sense, ever actually exist) I was also introduced to St. Uncumber. St. Uncumber is the patron saint of women whose husbands are a pain in the ass.

Apparently, St. Uncumber’s original name was the much more lyrical Wilgefortis. Wilgefortis wanted to live the chaste life of a virgin, but her parents wanted to marry her off. To get men to leave her alone, she prayed and prayed, so God gave her a beard.

I am not making this up. Someone else, maybe, but they’ve been dead a long long time so it’s best to just let it go.

So, St. Wilgefortis/Uncumber is the saint you should pray to for intercession if you’re a wife having trouble with your husband, so that Wilgefortis/Uncumber will talk to God and get Him to take him away. Wilgefortis, as I understand it, is the closest thing we have to an ethereal hitman.

From some web site I’ve already lost the address to:

Thomas More noted scornfully the custom among women in his day of making offerings of oats to the saint’s statue, which he said was so that she might ‘provide a horse for an evil husband to ride to the devil upon… because that they reckon that for a peck of oats she will not fail to uncumber them of their husbands.’

So, there’s some stuff I didn’t know yesterday.

For some irrational reason that I can barely explain, I have always chafed at the idea that I as a Catholic am required to give my kids a saint’s name. I know people who openly scorn parents who “make up” their kids’ names because “at least a saint’s name means something.” Some corner of my brain always nags, “Won’t that create a name bottleneck over time? Where will the new saints’ names come from? If you think Dakota or Dylan is a silly name, and then some Dylan starts parting rivers or healing lepers, does Dylan begin to mean something, and if so, what? Will you be all turned ’round on the subject of Dylan’s dumbness the day he cures your sore throat? Is that what it takes?” Anyway, reading about all of this I can’t help smirking when I think that people I know would give me shit for naming my kid Madison, but if I named her Wilgefortis Uncumber they’d be perfectly comfortable with that. That, you see, would not be stupid. Not like Madison or Cody.