The Fourteen Holy Helpers (German: Vierzehn Nothelfer, Latin: Quattuordecim auxiliatores) are a group of saints venerated together by Catholics because their intercession is believed to be particularly effective, especially against various diseases.

This group of Nothelfer ("helpers in need") originated in the 14th century at first in the Rhineland, largely as a result of the epidemic (probably of bubonic plague) that became known as the Black Death.

Devotion to the fourteen Holy Helpers began in Rhineland, now part of Germany, in the time of the Black Death.

Domestic animals were also attacked by the plague, and so Saints George, Elmo, Pantaleon, and Vitus were invoked for their protection.

[2] As the saints' joint cultus spread in the fifteenth century, Pope Nicholas V attached indulgences to devotion of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, though these no longer apply.

[11] In the case of the latter group, their supposed "legendary" status is primarily based on analysis of the saints' traditional hagiographies alone with out due consideration of other possibilities and interpretations, as well as the changes associated with the Mysterii Paschalis, irrespective of which changes actually applied to these particular saints — in the instance of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, while the feasts were in several cases removed from the General Roman Calendar, none were decanonized or were denied as having existed to begin with (furthermore, their feasts remain on particular calendars).

For one or another of the saints in the original set, Anthony the Anchorite, Leonard of Noblac, Nicholas, Sebastian, Oswald the King, Pope Sixtus II, Apollonia, Dorothea of Caesarea, Wolfgang of Regensburg or Roch were sometimes substituted.

[12] The Fourteen Holy Helpers are honored in Bavaria as the vierzehn Heiligen, and the Basilica of the Vierzehnheiligen is dedicated to these auxiliary saints.

One of the group depictions of the fourteen Saints is a 1503 altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald for the monastery in Lichtenfels in Upper Franconia.