Saints ancient and modern abound on the Web, but no decision has been made about who watches over the whole shebang.
By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published August 17, 2003
Commercial artist Josh Gosfield began making his friends into saints a couple of years ago.
Gosfield, who lives in New York City, wasn't proselytizing or even trying to make his pals behave. He used them as models to create a series of jokey photographs depicting "modern saints."
The he sent the photos out via e-mail to the Saint of the Month Club, a growing list of friends and friends of friends.
The project got noticed. A story in the New York Times Aug. 10 featured Gosfield's photos of such quasi-holy types as St. Jeromeo, a fellow in a wedding dress and a five-o'clock shadow, and St. Olga, "Gypsy saint of everywhere and nowhere," who holds a bottle of wine and a pug dog. They can be found at www.joshgosfield.com/saints.html
But there's really no need to create your own saints online. Saints are all over the Internet already.
And some of them are wired in from places you might not expect. San Xavier del Bac Mission, built between 1783 and 1797, is still an active Catholic church on the Tohono O'odham Reservation in southern Arizona.
One of the most revered icons in the church is a wooden statue, nearly life size, of its patron, St. Francis Xavier, a 16th century Jesuit missionary.
Parishioners pin photos of those they pray for to the saint's robes, as well as hundreds of milagros, tiny metal images of body parts: a miniature eye for a mother losing her sight, a little leg for a lame nephew.
But now the faithful need not trek to Tucson to request St. Francis' help. He's online, at www.sanxaviermission.org/Saint.html Just e-mail your prayer, and the Franciscan fathers at the church will print it out and place it with the milagros.
If Francis Xavier isn't the saint you had in mind, Catholic Online, at www.catholic.org has an entire subsite on saints and angels, which includes brief bios of hundreds of saints, a calendar of saints' days and an index of patron saints.
Some of those saints are keeping an eye on modern technology. St. Clare, founder of the Poor Clares religious order, was named the patron saint of television because she once saw a vision on a convent wall of a Mass being celebrated miles away that she could not attend because she was ill. (This was in the 12th century, before anyone had cable.)
The Vatican is even now in the process of choosing a patron saint for the Internet. The leading candidate, according to Catholic Online, is St. Isidore of Seville, a sixth century bishop renowned as an advocate of education. He wrote an encyclopedia, the Etymologies, that remained a popular textbook for nine centuries. Isidore's emphasis on exploring all branches of learning seems to be the key to his being proposed to watch over the Web.
But this is the Internet, so opinion is not unanimous. An Italian Web site, www.santiebeati.it let visitors vote this spring on their favorite candidate for Internet patron saint.
Isidore didn't even make the final six. The runaway favorite, with more than 23,000 votes, was someone who hasn't even been named a saint yet, though he has been beatified, the step before sainthood.
Blessed Giacomo Alberione, an Italian priest who died in 1971, was the founder of the Society of St. Paul, a religious congregation whose mission is communicating Christianity through media and technology.
The Paulines are active in publishing, television, radio and other media. So it seems logical to figure if Alberione had lived long enough, he would have been enthusiastic about the Web.
But maybe there already is a patron saint of the Internet. A Google search on the word "saint" turns up more than 19-million entries, but the one that gets the most visits is www.saintcorporation.com/products/saint_engine.html
That's the site that sells the Saint vulnerability scanning engine, a computer network security system.
