Being a roommate and living with a roommate is a matter of cooperation. Finding the best one can result in a total package of your manners and behaviors. Anyone who’s had a roommate can attest that your roommate can make or break your year—and even, at times, your soul. Here are some saints to whom we can ask intercession.
St. Basil the Great (330-379) and St. Gregory Nazianzen (329-390):
Both of them have two canonized parents and plenty of canonized siblings. They are well known for sharing a feast day not with family but with a friend who became closer than family. The two young men from modern-day Turkey met in Athens, where they had both moved to study and soon became fast friends and roommates. Gregory later wrote, “Our rivalry consisted, not in seeking the first place for oneself but in yielding it to the other, for we each looked on the other’s success as his own. We seemed to be two bodies with a single spirit.” Basil and Gregory competed not for honors or for learning but only for virtue, even as they both went on to become bishops. They did fight, sometimes bitterly (as when Gregory accused Basil of using him as a pawn in a battle with another bishop) but they loved each other fiercely and challenged each other to holiness in such a tremendous way that their friendship is the stuff not just of legend but of hagiography.
St. Dominica of Constantinople (395-474)
She was a woman from what is now Tunisia who left the home of her Christian parents and moved to Alexandria. There she lived along with four pagan women. Later she evangelized them and they were soon converted by the witness of their holy roommate. Dominica and her roommates eventually moved to Constantinople, where Dominica left behind her ministry to roommates and became a hermit. She spent the rest of her life in prayer and fasting, a miracle worker with the gift of prophecy.
St. Francis Xavier (1506-1552) and St. Peter Faber (1506-1546)
They were college roommates. There was no distinct heroic desire and relation until their third roommate arrived: an eccentric, middle-aged man with more money than sense (it seemed) and very little education. Francis in particular was intent on worldly success and thought their new roommate was a disaster. But the holiness of St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) began to rub off on his roommates. Peter soon decided God was calling him to the priesthood, and while Francis tried to ignore his roommate’s witness, there was only so long he could coexist with such holiness without desiring it himself. The three set their hearts on heaven, founding the Society of Jesus and becoming the first of many Jesuit saints.