Many of the saints, like St Patrick, whom we celebrate today, have geographical responsibilities and have been allocated a country, a district or a town over which to act as patron. Others have been assigned duties on vocational lines, being required to look after the needs of a profession.
Thus, for example, accountants look to St Matthew for any guidance they may need. St Luke is responsible for those engaged in medicine, and Thomas More looks after solicitors and barristers.
These appointments are well known. There are others that make sense as soon as you begin to think about them: St George and Joan of Arc have joint responsibility for military matters, and St Gabriel is the expert in communications and has been allocated radio, telephone and postal services.
And there are other instances with no obvious explanation, like St Clare's responsibility for television, St John Bosco's portfolio of newspaper editors, and a saint by the name of Ferdinand III who is responsible for engineers.
No list I have been able to consult, however, has a patron saint of weather people, but a likely candidate emerged some years ago.
Back in the 1920s, a notion became widespread in Britain that the existing vagaries of the date of Easter were ill founded and highly inconvenient. A Bill was introduced in parliament to establish a fixed time for the festival: it was to be the first Sunday after the second Saturday in April, which meant that it would always fall between April 9th and April 15th.
But then came controversy. Some 60 years before, a Scottish meteorologist, Alexander Buchan, believed that certain periods of the year were colder than they ought to be and that other spells were warm. His allegedly warm periods were July 12th to July 15th; August 12th to August 15th; and December 3rd to December 14th. The six cold spells were February 7th-14th; April 10th-14th; May 9th-14th; June 29th to July 4th; August 6th-11th; and November 6th-13th.
Someone spotted that the fixed Easter would coincide closely with Buchan's second cold spell; and as luck would have it, the cold spells came along precisely on schedule and with more than usual vehemence in the period during which this famous controversy raged. The Easter Act of 1928 eventually reached the statute books but remains unimplemented to this day.
All this made the late Mr Buchan very famous, more than he had ever been throughout his life. His predictive powers were eulogised in letters to the press, and one enthusiastic scribe was moved to suggest that the deceased scientist should be canonised forthwith and made the patron saint of meteorology.