According to Fr. Thurston: "the main object of this work was to provide a short, but readable and trustworthy, account of the principal saints venerated in the Western church, whose names are familiar to English speaking Catholics. The work was developed out of a projected new edition of the well-known Lives of the Saints by the Rev. Alban Butler, which was originally published in London between 1756 and 1759."

Father Herbert Thurston, S.J. undertook the work of modernizing this classic, by adding modern saints and making the text more readable. He published the first volume in 1926 and the last in 1938 before his death in 1939.

This app brings together Thurston's twelve volumes (one for each month) in a single complete work.