Final Exam Prep

With Finals Looming…Who Is the Patron Saint of Studying?

Mike Hayes Answers:

I can offer three that would be good to pray with:

1) St. Thomas Aquinas— the official patron of scholars and a doctor of the church. His great work, the Summa Theologica, might just be something you’re studying in fact.

2) Blessed John Newman is not yet a saint but is on the way to being one. He was very active in the intellectual life and set up centers for discussion so as to merge Catholics with intellectual conversation at universities as it was often misconstrued that to be Catholic is to be anti-intellectual. Campus Ministry Centers across the United States often bear his name. Read The Idea of the University sometime.

3) An obvious one is St. Ignatius of Loyola who founded the Jesuits whose charism is education. Many Jesuit universities exist in the United States and elsewhere including Georgetown, Boston College, Fordham, and Loyola Marymount.

If you’re really desperate, you just might want to try St. Rita or St. Jude, He is the patron saint of hopeless cases and has been known to dig a few people out of a jam.

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Prayer Before Study

Creator of all things, true source of light and wisdom, lofty origin of all being, graciously let a ray of your brilliance penetrate into the darkness of my understanding and take from me the double darkness in which I have been born, an obscurity of both sin and ignorance. Give me a sharp sense of understanding, a retentive memory, and the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally. Grant me the talent of being exact in my explanations, and the ability to express myself with thoroughness and charm. Point out the beginning, direct the progress, and help in completion; through Christ our Lord. Amen.