5 June saints you’ve never heard of and why you’ll love them

“Isn’t it somebody’s feast day today?” my daughter piped up last week, in a ploy to get me to stop for ice cream.

I had to laugh. These kids are too clever. My kids have figured out that I love celebrating the saints’ feast days with something special — a family outing, a prayer, a sweet treat, or going to Mass together.

Every month I like to check what saints have feast days coming up so we can celebrate them in little ways, like making French food for the feast of St. Joan of Arc. But this month, I was shocked to see several saints whose names I’ve never heard — even though I’ve always loved learning about the lives of the saints.

I did a little more research on these heavenly brothers and sisters and was delighted to find something to love about each one. Now I’m looking forward to adding these saints to our celebrations — maybe even we’ll go out for ice cream!

Ready to add a few new prayer warriors to your roster? Here are five saints with June feast days you might not have heard of. 

Let us know in the comments if you already do know about these saints, and how you have asked for their intercession!

This extraordinary religious sister risked her life during World War II by opening the doors of the Roman convent where she was Mother Superior to hide persecuted Jews. St. Maria Elizabeth worked as a nurse in New York before she converted to Catholicism and joined the Order of the Brigittine Sisters. 

Besides saving more than 60 Jewish people from the Holocaust, she dedicated her life to care of the sick and Christian unity, and worked so hard to revive the order St. Bridget founded that she became known as “the second Bridget.”

I admire her heroic courage and her dedication to working for unity among all Christians. 

Not a canonized saint (yet) but already well known for her holy life, this young Italian woman died only 14 years ago at age 28, after suffering heroically through terminal illness and the loss of two babies. Her husband and son attended Vatican events related to her possible beatification, and her husband has given interviews to Aleteia in 2017 and 2024. 

As a mom, I look forward to learning from the example of this holy young woman who lived in my own time.

So many great saints came from Poland, but St. Albert is lesser known than many others. This Polish Franciscan tertiary was a painter and disabled veteran who founded the Albertine Brothers and Albertine Sisters, both orders servants of the homeless and destitute. 

St. Albert worked tirelessly to serve the poor and the homeless, even living with them and dying in the shelter he established. St. John Paul II actually wrote a play about his life called Our God’s Brother.

This saint offers an unforgettable witness to love in action, especially for those whom the world is so quick to ignore.

Venerable Matt Talbot was a manual laborer from Dublin, Ireland, who transformed his life from debilitating alcoholism into recovery, freedom, and holiness. After hitting rock bottom in his late twenties, he took a lifelong pledge of sobriety and dedicated the rest of his life to prayer, penance, and charity. 

It’s easy to think that we are “too far gone” to turn our lives around, but this saint shows us that God can make anything possible, even when we can’t quite believe it ourselves.

This saint doesn’t quite belong on this list of “saints you haven’t heard of,” as you probably have heard of him. He founded Opus Dei, a widely known Catholic community for people seeking to sanctify their ordinary lives by offering their work to God. 

There are currently about 85,000 members of Opus Dei worldwide, so St. Josemaria is not exactly a “little known” saint. But although you might have heard of Opus Dei, you might not know much about its founder, a Spanish priest who had an extraordinary vision of helping ordinary lay Catholics become saints. 

St. Josemaria lived at a time when lay people were too often seen as “second-class citizens”: Many Catholics lived as though holiness and deep spiritual devotion were reserved for the clergy and religious orders. Into this environment he brought a revolutionary message of the universal call to holiness, the idea that ordinary people could achieve sanctity without leaving the world. His vision anticipated the theological shift that would sweep through the Church just a few decades later during the Second Vatican Council.

I love that this saint reminds me to sanctify my ordinary days as a wife and mother, doing my daily work with love for the glory of God.