You don't tug on Superman's cape . . .

Jeff Miller is clearly more popular, funnier and holier than I am. Still I have to take exception to his recent suggestion that bloggers claim St. Jerome as the patron saint of blogging. Too often when a blogger mentions St. Jerome, it seems to be an effort to excuse behavior from a fit of pique to outright misanthropy. St. Jerome isn’t recognized as a saint because of his temperament, or even because of his blog-like letter-writing, but primarily because of his Scripture scholarship and outstanding faculties in the Latin language. For us to thus claim his patronage would be highly presumptuous given both the general dearth of in-depth discussion of Scripture found in most Catholic blogs and the literary achievements of the same.

Let it not be said that I’m merely being negative, though, as I have in mind a patron for St. Blog’s that I find all the more fitting: St. Maximilian Kolbe.

This holy man, one of the first saints canonized by our late Holy Father, is a fitting blog-patron for many reasons including:

* He published a popular Polish Catholic magazine that rapidly grew in circulation, then began publishing a Polish Catholic newspaper – periodical publishing to a broad audience is rather like blogging except on blogs like this one that are read by so very few);

* He expanded missionary activity and publishing from Poland to Japan – being a saint with an immediate world-wide reach;

* He started a Catholic radio service when radio was a rather new medium, just like the web is a relatively new medium today;

* He dealt with the actual Nazi regime, while blogdom in general is awash in violations of Godwin’s law;

* He is a patron of journalists and bloggers tend to be watchdogs over journalists;

* He is a patron of addicts and most bloggers are somewhat addicted to blogging;

* In some pictures he, like many notable male Catholic bloggers, sports a fine beard; and

* He’s a Franciscan so he’s outside both the tension between Carmelites and Dominicans and the general opprobrium directed toward contemporary sons of St. Ignatius.