Introduction The concept of mentoring--in which a seasoned practitioner consults with and oversees the work of a less experienced person--has received a great deal of attention lately in education circles. It has long been standard practice to mentor absolute beginners: every elementary and secondary school teacher can remember student teaching, and many colleges and universities designate faculty members to visit new teaching assistants'' classes and to hold advisory conferences. Today, many institutions have expanded mentoring, assigning experienced teachers to work with new faculty members in their first years of employment. Additionally, mentors can be designated to work with those whose evaluations suggest the need for improvement. Formal and informal brown-bag lunches, in-­service meetings, and after-hours sessions also invite teachers to draw on more experienced colleagues. We can learn a great deal from those who have been teaching for a long time, and these are lessons about the reality of interaction with students that no textbook, no educational theory class can provide. Mentors can offer stories about the times they have been frustrated or surprised; they can offer suggestions and inspirations gained from long experience; they can open new teachers'' eyes to wider perspectives. Beyond these physically present mentors, most of us who are teachers, no matter how experienced, also rely on absent mentors through our memories of our own past best teachers.

We use their methods; we model their classroom and evaluation styles. We steal their exercises and insights into particular subject matter. Sometimes we even catch ourselves sounding like them or using their gestures. "What would X do in this situation?" we ask ourselves, when we are at our wits'' end. These internal mentors can save our professional lives, and our sanity. After one difficult day a few years ago in my own teaching career, when I had solved a problem by doing what I guessed a beloved mentor of mine would have done, I caught myself thanking her out loud as I drove home. For several months, I''d been reading my way through Butler''s Lives of the Saints daily as a sort of morning meditation, and it suddenly struck me that such psychological summoning of my mentor was a kind of veneration, a grateful invoking of someone on whom, to paraphrase the Catholic liturgy, I''d "relied for help." As I thought about that insight over the next few days, I realized that I''d also been drawing practical inspiration from my morning readings, that some of the literal saints recognized by the Catholic Church had been very, very helpful to me in my teaching life as well as my spiritual one.

This book has grown from that recognition. Its basic premise is that reflecting on the lives of the saints as mentors has a great deal to offer all teachers. One doesn''t have to be Catholic to appreciate the rich paradigms that saints'' lives offer; one doesn''t have to believe, even, that all of the personalities chronicled actually existed. One simply has to believe in the power of stories. Lest teachers shake their heads at this point and complain that they are expected to be saints enough already--working long hours for little pay, encumbered with extra duties, held to impossibly high standards--let me offer the reassurance that saints doesn''t mean "perfect people." In fact, one of the most attractive things about saints'' stories has always been that many of them chronicle complicated, vexed human lives, much like ours. Some saints were anything but saintly in their early years. Others, even while leading lives regarded as holy, are reported to have been headstrong, impatient, or just plain prickly.

Some got angry; some flailed around before finding their callings; some lost heart temporarily. Nor were their paths easy, with angel choruses showing them the right things to do. The stories of many saints show them facing challenges that echo teachers'' daily challenges. Like us, saints are depicted as often having to deal with recalcitrant and difficult people (including peers). Their stories record that saints faced self-doubt and dry spells in their own inspiration or became too full of themselves; they reached moments when they recognized that their once-­helpful paradigms had to change. But all of them found ways to rekindle vocation, and all persevered in doing the work they were meant to do. The idea of drawing on saints as human models is a very old one, for the Catholic Church has always considered saints as different in degree, not kind, from the ordinary faithful. Saints are, Jacques Douillet has written, "those who march in front and give the example.

" In the very earliest years of the church, they were simply people who, after their deaths, were venerated by Christians. Saints included martyrs and other holy people whose names had been recorded (canonized) so that others would remember them. Said to be sitting in the presence of Christ, they were believed to be able to intercede directly for the faithful. At first, saints were chosen by local acclaim, their cults centered on their tombs and relics. The centralized church didn''t get involved until the Middle Ages, when the increasing power of the papacy lent prestige to a pope''s authorization of a saint. During the reign of Innocent III (1198-1216), more formal procedures for canonization were established. The process was further consolidated in 1634, when Pope Urban VIII declared that it was the pope''s responsibility alone to designate saints, although those honored previously were grandfathered in. Urban VIII systematized a process of investigation requiring written records, evidence of miracles, or other documentation.

The procedure was formulated definitively in the 1917 Code of Canon Law, then reformed in 1983 by Pope John Paul II, who changed the previously trial-like inquiry (which involved a formal devil''s advocate who presented unfavorable facts about the nominee) to a more streamlined process. Under John Paul II, 484 new saints were added to the calendar, many from parts of the world that previously had been underrepresented: Asia, North and South America, Africa. Today a holy person becomes a saint in three stages. First, the person is declared venerable, which means that the saint can be venerated in a particular place or by a particular congregation. To earn this designation, the church collects all of the person''s writings and evidence from witnesses about his or her life and miracles, and makes minute inquiries. The evidence is sent to Rome and considered by judges. If the person is found to be a martyr or to be noted for the "heroism of his virtue," the pope designates him blessed. In order for the person to become a full-fledged saint, ongoing documentation must be provided, including evidence of further miracles.

Once the pope formally canonizes the person by proclamation in Rome, the designation is ­irrevocable. Catholic tradition continues to honors saints on their feast days, and religious art depicting them hangs in many churches. Many Catholics still associate particular saints with particular occupations, life stages, difficulties, and ailments, and they pray to those saints for specific help in appropriate circumstances. People who "hearingly and unconditionally respond[ed] to God''s call" and "led a life of ever-­increasing union and conformity with Christ," saints are thought to be close enough to Christ to intercede for their followers. "Friends in heaven," the New Catholic Encyclopedia calls them. As the ­twenty-first century begins, thousands of men and women have been honored as blesseds or saints. No one knows how many saints have been venerated during the history of the church, given the lack of early records about locally recognized saints and irresolvable confusion about whether or not some early saints with the same or similar names were the same person. The latest edition of the Roman Martyrology alone, which is limited to premodern saints, includes 6,500.

The earliest extant calendar of saints dates from the fourth century; by the Middle Ages, many calendars and martyrologies were available, including Jacobus de Voragine''s The Golden Legend, a best seller in ­thirteenth-­century century Europe, which has continued to stay in print and interest scholars. During the Reformation, Protestants derided veneration of the saints as idolatry and the stuff of legend. In response, the Bollandists, a group of Jesuits, began in the early seventeenth century a rigorous investigation into the lives of saints that sought to distinguish reliable information from unreliable. Their ongoing research has resulted in the publication of more than sixty volumes. A multivolume calendar of the lives of about 1,500 saints for English readers was compiled by Reverend Alban Butler and published in London between 1756 and 1759. This work, revised and brought up-to-date by Herbert J. Thurston in the early twentieth century, then again by Thurston in cooperation with Donald Atwater in 1956, was reprinted in a manageable four-­volume format in the 1980s and 1990s. The 1996 edition of this work--which blends the inspirational, the amazing, and the frankly bizarre--is my own favorite early morning read.

Saints have become so popular in recent years ("They''re the new angels," someone said to me as I prepared this book) that many works about them are currently in print. One of the most widely available is The Oxford Dictionary of the Saints, which has recently been updated (2004) to include a broader range of saints, including some of John Paul II''s canonizations. From the myriad of extant saints, the work that follows selects a limited number whose lives and works have particular relevan.