A community recognizes certain deceased persons as having lived with exceptional holiness and as remaining capable of intercession. Those persons are saints. Formal processes of canonization exist in some traditions; popular devotion often precedes official recognition.

Saints serve as models of virtue, patrons of places and occupations, and companions in prayer. Their relics and images become focal points of devotion. Hagiographies narrate their lives with varying degrees of historical precision. Different churches maintain different calendars of saints.

Protestant traditions generally reject the invocation of saints while still honoring exemplary lives. In traditions that venerate them, saints make the communion of the living and the dead concrete. Ordinary believers find in the saints both inspiration and accessible advocates.

A saint is remembered as someone in whom the purposes of God became unusually visible.