July 2 -- Feast of Saint Lidano of Sezze

Help me! I'm threatened.

According to Amphibian Ark, an action & advocacy group established to prevent further extinction of amphibian species, 165 types of amphibians have already been lost.  Thirty percent (1,895) more are threatened.  Five hundred more species cannot be saved in the wild and must be conserved in captivity if they are not also to become extinct.  And Saint Lidano of Sezze might not have cared at all.

That lion is hungry

Lidano had been a monk since he was nine years old, so he understood monastic life more than he understood the circle of life.  He established a monastery in Sezze, about forty miles from Rome, in the late eleventh century.  We must remember that this is an area for outsized heroism.  According to legend, Hercules himself founded the town (Setia) after defeating the Lestrigones, a tribe of man-eating giants.  Sezze's coat of arms has the Nemian Lion on it.  He tried to drain the Pontine marshes near the monastery, but was unsuccessful. 

Shhh... that guy is praying again

Frustrated with the incessant peeping and croaking of the nearby frogs whose habitat remained stubbornly habitable for them, Lidano hit the marsh with his staff and commanded that the frogs be silent so that a man of God could pray.  The frogs immediately ended their ruckus, and according to the legend, never peeped or croaked again.  They were the curiously silent frogs of Sezze.

It is, I guess, unverifiable since the twentieth century Sezzians succeeded where Lidano failed.  The marsh is drained and Lidano has all the quiet he can handle in a crypt beneath the Sezze cathedral.  He was translated back there after he died at the monastery at Monte Cassino, where he had retired when the marsh wars had exhausted him.