The full post has Content Warnings for medieval brutality and sainthood.
November 1st is All Saints’ Day. It’s also Autistics Speaking Day, when blogs and social media will be full of posts about Autistic Spectrum Disorder.
I like acronyms, and this holy trinity of ASDs seems too good to pass by.
The trouble is, there isn’t an official Patron Saint of Autism or Autistic people (sadly the Church has been a little slow in canonising The Twelfth Doctor). Various Saints have been suggested, but they’re usually either Saints connected with mental illness, like S. Dymphna, or Saints who deal with generic healing, like S. Raphael or S. Philomena. If you’re interested in celebrating Autism, rather than trying to pray the Autism out of people, these are probably poor choices.
There aren’t even any Saints who definitely were Autistic, because of course Autism has only been recognised and defined relatively recently. But there have been plenty of Saints who weren’t exactly “normal,” and some whose life stories feature events and character traits that might just ring a bell with some of us. I’m not a fan of armchair diagnosis of historical figures, but sometimes you have to take your kicks where you can find them. So, especially for ASDx3, here’s my personal, partial and totally unofficial shortlist of Patron Saints of Autism:
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