Patron Saint

So many parents and alumni of St. Denis Catholic School in Havertown supported merging with friendly CYO rival Annunciation B.V.M., the marriage should have gone off without a hitch. Instead, parishioners hoping to embrace the past and future in a name were told the regional school would honor the late Cardinal John Foley. The decision was, in their pastor's words, "nonnegotiable. " Children voted on a mascot, only to have their choices (Cardinals, Falcons, or Phoenixes)

It has been 470 years since the Blessed Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to a poor and humble Mexican, but every December, Mexican pilgrims still walk as far as 100 miles to worship at La Basilica de Guadalupe, a cathedral built in her honor. On Sunday, Norristown's rapidly growing Mexican community plans to make its first procession in honor of Mexico's patron saint. "It is a grand celebration for Mexican Catholics," said Guadalupe Nogueda, 46, a native of Guerrero, Mexico, who owns Lupita's Mexican Market at Swede and Chestnut Streets.

Camden's Broadway shook to a cacophony of air horns, Spanish guitars and salsa yesterday afternoon as 5,000 Latinos jammed the streets for three hours to celebrate the annual San Juan Bautista Parade. Yesterday's event, held to honor Puerto Rico's patron saint, John the Baptist, was the largest city parade in at least a decade, boasted Mayor Aaron Thompson as he watched the parade assemble in front of the Walt Whitman Poetry Center. "The Hispanic community is waking up," said South Camden grocer Freddy Alvarado, a parade organizer.

Sitting in church Sunday morning, I knew I wasn't going to hear a stirring sermon inspired by the 25th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's death. I had chosen a nearby Episcopal church with a mostly white congregation, where the minister's remarks focused on the meaning of Palm Sunday. The anniversary of the King assassination was no doubt a popular theme in pulpits of many black churches. The difference was predictable, and illustrative of the fact that the Kerner Commission warning (also 25 years old this year)

If there were a patron saint of sports here, it would be Willie DeJarnette. DeJarnette, who died in 1999 at 87, organized and oversaw a youth athletic club in Chester for five decades, starting in the late 1940s. After the Chester Upland School District's middle-school sports program was eliminated in the mid-1970s for budgetary reasons, he restored it and ran it for 20 years, raising money and recruiting volunteers. He founded and ran adult basketball and football teams, and he was a lifelong baseball enthusiast, both as a semipro player and as the founder of several local teams.

On June 24, 1943, Justina Ramirez put a bucket full of water outside her door in Puerto Rico. Then, she threw the letters of the alphabet she had cut out of paper into the bucket, just the way her father had told her. The next morning she ran outside to see which letters were floating, because, according to the St. John Baptist tradition, those letters would reveal the initials of the man she was going to marry. When Ramirez saw the I and the R, she was disappointed. She did not know anybody with those initials.

With flags waving, salsa music blaring, and shouts of "Que viva Puerto Rico!" ringing through the air, thousands of people flocked to the waterfront yesterday for the annual Parada San Juan Bautista to celebrate Puerto Rican culture and heritage. Spectators lined up along Haddon Avenue and Mickle Boulevard in downtown Camden to watch the parade wind toward Wiggins Park, where the afternoon's festivities ended with a salsa concert featuring Puerto Rican star Johnny Rivera, Anthony Colon and Los Muchachitos de Merengue.

Much as Americans look upon the Stars and Stripes as the national icon of U.S. ideals and values, so does a small copper-and-gold statue, the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre, symbolize Cuba. To millions, she is Cuba's patron saint, its protector, and most sacred symbol, which was crowned yesterday by Pope John Paul II in a dramatic ceremony in the eastern city of Santiago. The 18-inch-high icon, always dressed in an orange-gold cape, represents the Roman Catholic faith, yet it is also the symbol of Ochun, an erotic deity in the Afro-Cuban religion of Santeria, the "Way of the Saints.

You might not realize it, but there may be just as many three-inch statues of St. Joseph in your neighborhood as there are for-sale signs. As selling a house becomes more of a miracle in the ravaged local housing market, more people than you would guess are buying plastic statues of the patron saint of houses and burying them in their lawns to seek divine help, according to owners of religious-goods stores. "We're constantly selling out of St. Joseph statues," said Norma DiCocco, co-owner of three branches of the St. Jude Shop, which sells religious goods.

It's the disease some people only whisper, like a prayer. Cancer. To some patients and their loved ones, that dreaded word is synonymous with suffering and death and despair. But the priests and parishioners of St. Bartholomew Roman Catholic Church in Wissinoming have found that reckoning with cancer also can bring peace and hope. And tomorrow, the parish will formally dedicate a new shrine to St. Peregrine, patron saint of people and caretakers of those with cancer (and more recently, of AIDS and other serious illness)

So many parents and alumni of St. Denis Catholic School in Havertown supported merging with friendly CYO rival Annunciation B.V.M., the marriage should have gone off without a hitch. Instead, parishioners hoping to embrace the past and future in a name were told the regional school would honor the late Cardinal John Foley. The decision was, in their pastor's words, "nonnegotiable. " Children voted on a mascot, only to have their choices (Cardinals, Falcons, or Phoenixes)

DUBLIN - Somewhere in Ireland, a burglar has the heart of a saint. Officials at Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin said yesterday that they're distraught and perplexed over the theft of the church's most precious relic: the preserved heart of St. Laurence O'Toole, patron saint of Dublin. O'Toole's heart had been displayed in the cathedral since the 13th century. It was stored in a heart-shaped wooden box and secured in a small, square iron cage on the wall of a chapel dedicated to his memory.

MAHANOY CITY - In celebration of the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals and the environment, residents gathered their pets Saturday morning to be blessed. While pets blessed may include cats, fish and birds, only man's best friend was seen at the service in the parking lot across from the Blessed Teresa of Calcutta Education Center, South Catawissa. Although the breeds present varied from beagle to Shih Tzu, all dogs and their owners were welcome.

Carmella Romanelli may have missed a few of the processions in her 84 years, but she can't remember when. In tiny Bridgeport on Sunday, she sat on her rolling walker outside Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church - where she was baptized and where she and her parents had their wedding ceremonies - and her tears welled in anticipation. Mass was over, and men were carrying the statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel down the steps to a crowd in the street, where the 87th annual procession would be held on the last day of the church's Italian festival.

BEER, ACCORDING to the adage that has been attributed to Benjamin Franklin, "is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. " If that's true, it was the product of an extensive lobbying effort. No other pastime has more saints advocating on its behalf than beer drinking. A definitive list compiled by my beer-drinking associate Jay Brooks of the San Jose Mercury News lists 29 saints who've been employed to represent our interests. They range from St. Arnold of Metz, whose casket spewed suds during his funeral procession, to Gambrinus, who falsely claimed to have invented beer.

U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah has two elections on his mind these days. The first is his race to serve a ninth term in the U.S. House of Representatives - which he seems certain to win on Election Day in November. The second is far less predictable. Fattah, a member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, is waging a campaign among his Democratic colleagues to win the post of committee chairman. His rival is Washington Rep. Norman Dicks, who has far more seniority on the panel.

The third-floor boardroom of Urban Outfitters Inc., with its magnificent reclaimed-white-pine-and-hemlock table and its sky-blue view of the Delaware River, has been a busy scene for the soon-to-be heads of hip. Jeff Spotts couldn't help but bring it up the other day as he walked through a nearby construction site, the renovation of yet another old Navy Yard building for the company's ballooning headquarters: a 54,000-square-foot stunner whose...

I read recently that St. John Bosco School in Warminster is closing at the end of the school year due to low enrollment. The school has only 152 students in kindergarten through eighth grade. This startled me, because when I attended it, from 1957 to 1965, there were often 100 kids in a class - a single, zoo-like class. Where did everyone go? Bosco opened in 1953, near the height of the baby boom. It was housed in a nondescript, cheaply constructed building. I got a miserable education there, although I emerged with good penmanship and the ability to diagram sentences.

WHAT WOULD Santa drink? Listen, kids, contrary to the tales Mom and Dad told you, Father Christmas did not get that round belly and red nose from gulping down glasses of skim milk. Not to destroy your innocent visions of sugar plums and candy canes, but when it comes to treats on a long winter's night, if it's all the same to you, Santa Claus would rather have a beer. Sacrilege, you say? The very symbol of childhood innocence guzzling alcohol? What's next, Frosty the Snowman doing Jell-O shots?

The young man on Albert Maguire's operating table had a big red mark stamped on the right side of his forehead. The mark told the surgeon just where to insert his needle: straight into the patient's right eye. Maguire didn't really need the reminder. He and his wife, molecular geneticist Jean Bennett, had been focusing on this moment for months - in truth, for decades. The patient was blind. Maguire's hair-thin needle traveled through the "white" of his eye, all the way back to his badly scarred retina, where it would deliver billions of genetically modified viruses.