Three Couple Saints Still Teaching Us How to Love
The Church gives us a calendar full of saints, and this July it hands us three married pairs worth knowing. Each marriage speaks to something we’re still learning ourselves.
We often picture saints as solitary figures – the hermit in his cave, or the martyr standing alone before the lions. But holiness is just as often a team effort.
Some of the most quietly powerful examples the Church offers us are married couples who became holy together, side by side. July gives us three of them, and each has something to say to us in our own marriages.
Joachim and Anne: trusting the long wait
On 26 July we honour Joachim and Anne, the parents of Mary and the grandparents of Jesus. Scripture tells us almost nothing about them, yet the Church has treasured their memory for centuries.
They were an older Jewish couple, long past the usual season of childbearing, when their daughter was conceived – and conceived, we believe, free from original sin.
That detail says something about the home they made. The Immaculate Conception didn’t unfold in a vacuum; it took root within a marriage marked by purity of heart and a stubborn fidelity to God’s promises.
Joachim and Anne kept believing when the waiting must have felt endless.
Most of us know that ache – the prayer that hasn’t been answered, the hope deferred year after year.
Their feast is a reminder that God’s timing is rarely our own, and that quiet faithfulness can prepare the ground for graces we may never live to see.
Priscilla and Aquila: a marriage on mission
On 8 July, the Church remembers Priscilla and Aquila, Jewish converts who threw themselves into spreading the Gospel. They were tentmakers who hosted the early Church in their home, travelled the Mediterranean, and worked alongside St Paul – who lived under their roof for a time.
That last detail is rather wonderful to sit with. Paul’s famous teaching in Ephesians 5 – where he compares marriage to the union of Christ and his Church and calls it a ‘great mystery’ – may well have been shaped by what he observed up close in this couple.
There’s no mention of any children in the scriptures and so we can interpret their fruitfulness flowed outward into hospitality, teaching and mission. Not every couple is called to raise a family, but every couple is called to be generous with the love they share.
For those wondering how their marriage might serve something bigger than themselves, Priscilla and Aquila are proof that two people pulling in the same direction can become a launching pad for the Gospel.
Louis and Zélie Martin: fruitful through suffering
On 12 July, we celebrate Louis and Zélie Martin, the first spouses canonised together as a couple.
Their life was hardly easy. They buried four of their nine children in infancy, and Zélie herself died of breast cancer while her children were still young.
And yet, what fruit! All five of their surviving daughters entered religious life, and the youngest – Thérèse of Lisieux – became a saint and a Doctor of the Church, teaching the world her ‘little way’ of doing small things with great love.
The Martins remind us that holiness is not the absence of suffering but love that keeps choosing fidelity in the middle of it. They didn’t shield their children from grief; they walked through it with them, prayerfully, and trusted God with the rest.
It’s tempting to keep saints on a pedestal, safely out of reach. But these were ordinary couples – they worried and grieved and waited, just as we do. What set them apart was a willingness to let their love be shaped by God rather than by their own comfort.
This July, perhaps we might choose one of these couples and ask their intercession for our own marriage. Holiness was never meant to be done alone, so let us take inspiration and confidence from their example to pursue holiness side by side, just as they did.
