Long before Dr. Phil or Suze Orman or Dr. Spock, there were St. Anne and St. Francis and, for that matter, St. Patrick just three of the more than 3,100 patron saints (and counting) whom Catholics have always relied on to help with whatever ails them.

Now, it’s true that people don’t pray to Dr. Phil. (Well, let’s hope they don’t.) And it should also be noted that when you pray to St. Anne, you’re not asking her to solve your problem. You’re just asking her to help: Saints act as intermediaries between you and the Big Guy.

This is partly why the spirit moved Clare and Alice La Plante to write a book that was less about self-help and more about saintly help. The sisters (as in siblings, not nuns) are Catholics who grew up in Arlington Heights, Ill. Both are writers. Both are self-acknowledged worrywarts who are partial toward invoking the saints. It occurred to them that the saints they sought help from might be of use to anybody, Catholic or not.

“I thought what was needed was a bedside book that tells you who to pray to and what to say,” explained Alice, who now works and teaches in California.

That book, “Heaven Help Us: The Worrier’s Guide to the Patron Saints” (Dell, $9.95), details dozens of saints, complete with their often colorful and always courageous lives, as well as their, shall we say, “specialties.”

Looking for love

Saints are versatile, and frequently specific. There’s bound to be one, and often there’s more than one, to help with life’s big problems such as depression (St. John the Baptist) or legal trouble (St. Basil the Great) as well as countless mundane ones, from cooking help (St. Lawrence) and toothaches (St. Apollonia) to headaches (St. Teresa of Avila).

Still, with just more than 75 saints mentioned, that still left the La Plantes with literally thousands of untapped resources.

“We were just going to do a Saints Part Two,” said Clare, an Evanston, Ill.-based writer who teaches magazine journalism at Columbia College Chicago. “But we kept getting this feedback about the love chapter.”

So their second book, which was published earlier this year, offers a more focused point of view: “Dear Saint Anne, Send Me a Man and Other Time-Honored Prayers for Love” (Universe, $16.95).

Despite the title, St. Anne and a host of her colleagues offer equal-opportunity assistance for all those, male or female, with love trouble. That includes the lonely single (St. Helena), the miserably married (St. Edward) and the heartbroken (St. Rita).

The name of their book, explain the La Plantes, refers to one of the poems (“Dear St. Anne, send me a man, as quick as you can”) that has been passed along for years, along with “St. Luke, St. Luke, be kind to me. In dreams let me my true love see” and “St. Agnes who to lovers kind, come ease the trouble of my mind.”

Ritual help

What the La Plantes say make their books different from other saintly compendiums are the poems and rituals (lighting candles, collecting herbs, burying statues upside down, that kind of thing) that have been employed to petition various saints over the years.

The sisters did a lot of research, but they also interviewed a variety of sources because many of these approaches have been handed down through word-of-mouth.

“The rituals themselves aren’t necessarily church-sanctioned,” Clare said. (A heartfelt prayer is all it really takes.) “(But) the whole aspect of the ritual is a way to let go of the problem.”