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Saint Francis de Sales (1567-1622) the patron saint of newspaper columnists.

Today's column-sermon (your columnist preaching it with love) is on the thrilling theme of saints and saintliness.

For in an eerie coincidence just as Australians begin to seriously beatify St Pauline of Ipswich, a blockbusting exhibition about St Francis of Assisi has opened at the National Gallery of Australia.

Meanwhile in the wider world we learn from US Vice-President JD Vance's just-published book that he has a patron saint, Saint Augustine. Augustine was adopted by Vance upon his, Vance's, relatively recent conversion from "angry atheism" to Roman Catholicism.

Thinking reviewers of the book (including the reviewer in The New Yorker point out that nowhere in it does Vance answer the question of how he finds it possible to simultaneously serve both a pure and loving God and a satanically filthy and evil president (Trump).

The National Gallery's Arthur Boyd: Tapestries is an exhibition of Boyd's 20 huge tapestries illustrating the spiritually action-packed, miracle-stippled life of St Francis. The exhibition is exquisitely, hauntingly presented in darkened spaces in which each tapestry is lustrously lit. It sets the thinking mind thinking about saints and sainthood.

So for example, at this time in which I am having appointment with mental health professionals I have looked up their patron saint and find it is the 13th century mystic Christina the Astonishing.

Then, at this time when the world (including Socceroo-crazed Australia) is feverish with World Cup fever, we remember that football and footballers have an official........

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