Dictionary of Saints.

Dictionary of Saints John D. Delaney Published by Doubleday Press 2003 pp. 702, hardcover $53.00 CAN

This dictionary was first published in 1980, and sold 200,000 copies. Its second edition, reviewed here, has added to the first edition some saints and blesseds who have been beatified or canonized since that time. The criterion for this addition has been that the saint or blessed is a person about whom, in the opinion of the author, "the modern reader would be most likely to seek information." The book has the 5000 persons in the Roman Calendar. It contains our new Canadian saints but only a few of the blesseds. The lives vary in length from a few lines for the less well-known saints up to a page or more for the better known ones or those about whom more is known. They are written not for scholars but for the general reader. The author says that they are written concisely but accurately, and that legendary or doubtful matters are indicated as such.

The most famous Dictionary of Saints in English was written by Father Alban Butler (1710-73) and published in four volumes in 1756-59, the fruit of thirty years of labour. It told the lives of 1600 saints. It had frequent minor revisions DUE a major revision oy Father Herbert Thurston, S.J., was published in 1926-38, and a second revised edition by D. Attwater came out in four volumes (2800 pages) in 1956, and was reprinted in 1981. The latest up-to-date edition is in twelve smaller volumes, one for each month, and costs $437 in Canada.

Because many of the saints lived in early Christian times, their history is not always subject to verification today, and many legends grew up about them the veracity of which cannot be checked. Because, however, the lives of saints are so important for Catholics, a Jesuit priest, Jean Bolland (1596-1665), of Antwerp, Belgium, with a few co-workers, began a critical study and publication of lives of the saints. The chief publication of the Bollandists, as they are called, is Acta Sanctorum (the Deeds of the Saints). In 1643 the first volume of the Acta appeared, with an account of the lives of saints whose feast-day is in January; it was followed in 1658 with lives of the February saints. Up to the present day, sixty-seven large volumes have appeared. So we are privileged, through the work of these few men, to have excellent histories of the lives of our religious heroes.

The book considered here has a number of appendices: (1) A list of persons or things for which a saint is traditionally a patron or an intercessor. (2) A list of saints who are patrons of countries or places. (3) A list of symbols of saints in art. (4) A chronological chart of popes and world rulers. (5) The Roman Calendar of saints and blesseds for each day of the year. (6) The corresponding Byzantine Calendar, for the Eastern Catholic Church.