A Saint for All Occasions

 When standing in St. Peter's Square in Rome, it's hard to miss the statues looking down upon you from - well - everywhere.  There are sculptures of 140 Saints  just on the colonnade overlooking the plaza.  Most of the "popular" saints (there are more than 10,000 in total) have a particular iconography so their likeness can be more easily distinguished from other, perhaps less saintly saints.

On our previous camino walks, there always seems to be one Saint that, for some reason, catches our fancy.  When we walked the French section of the Camino Frances in 2017, I was fascinated by St. Leon

 shown here holding his head. I even wrote a blog post about him.  When we were in Spain I was enamoured with Saint Sebastion, who was always depicted quite full of arrows.  The likeness below is in Santiago de Compostela.

Not surprisingly, St. Sebastion is the patron Saint of Archers.  When we got to Spello, in Umbria, there is a lovely sculpture of St. Peter the Martyr, a cleaver planted firmly in his skull.

Being slightly dehydrated at the time, and feeling a headache coming on, I was confident St. Peter the Martyr would be the patron saint of headache sufferers: I would soon feel relief being in his presence. 

Alas, that honor goes to St Teresa of Avila. St. Peter the Martyr (one of the 25 Saints named "Peter") is the Patron Saint of the Morality Police.  Oh well.