SAINT MAYBE

In the season finale of 'Kyle XY', Amanda Bloom (the girl next door and Kyle's secret crush) used her faith to help Kyle sort out his inner conflicts once his "real" parents came to claim him.

She told him about how her religion (Roman Catholicism) has a patron saint for just about everything and that Kyle should seek out a saint of his own for his unique situation. Among the examples she listed for what's "protected" by a patron saint, she listed cab-drivers, stomach-aches, and geese.

There are actually two patron saints for geese - Gall, and Martin of Tours. (Those are two more than my uncle and my brother would like, as Canadian geese really foul up the water and the front lawns of our cottages up at "The Lake" in Connecticut. Geese don't deserve patronage in their opinion.)

There are quite a handful of patron saints in connection to stomach-aches, or in a more general sense, stomach illnesses:

Fiacre
Emerentiana
Eramus
Brice
Timothy
Wolfgang
Charles Borremeo

Amanda may have been pulling these categories out of thin air as just guesses that they have patron saints. Her Catholic faith is very strong though, stronger than mine ever was, and maybe she really does know a saint for each item. If so, I'm thinking she would have been thinking of St. Emerentiana when it comes to stomach-ache. She just sounds like someone Amanda might have taken an interest in.

It's the taxi drivers category that most interested me once I began research on this bit of TV trivia. As with the others, there is more than one saint watching out for cabbies; four in all. The most probable one that Amanda had in mind would likely be St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers. Also included in this very select club are St. Frances of Rome and once again, St. Fiacre.

But it was the fourth one that I found most exciting from a Toobworld perspective - St. Eligius!
Here's what I found at a Catholic website:

St. Eligius
He has become the traditional patron of all smiths, metal workers, and craftsmen. His patronage of horses and the people who work with them stems first from his patronage of smiths and craftmen, but also from his having left a horse to a priest at his death. The new bishop liked the horse, and took it from the priest. The horse became sick, but recovered immediately when it was returned to the priest that Eligius had chosen.

There is also a legend of Eligius removing a horse's leg in order to easy shoe it. In some places horses are blessed on his feast day.

Through the years, horse-drawn cabs were replaced by motorized ones, and stables were supplanted by garages and gas stations, but the patronage of the people who do those jobs and work in those places has remained.

Cool beans, huh? Amanda lives out in Seattle and probably has no idea that there is a St. Eligius Hospital back in Boston. (For the record, I don't subscribe to the snowglobe interpretation of the 'St. Elsewhere' finale.) But it's nice to know the saint still carries some influence over a Toobworld character after nearly twenty years......

BCnU!
Tele-Toby

PS:
There is a patron saint for Toobworld and all things Television: St. Claire. I have a small plastic statue of her standing by my VCR.

And when you turn off the lights, she glows!

Now THAT's Catholicism, baby!