St. Joanna was the wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward (Lk. 8:3) and a disciple of Jesus, and mentioned in Luke (8.3) as providing for Jesus and the Apostles. According to Eastern tradition, when Herod had John the Baptist beheaded, he cast the head out into an unclean place. Joanna took the head and buried it with [...]
St. Julia was born of noble parents in North Africa. When she was still quite young, her city was conquered by barbarians. Julia was captured and sold as a slave to a pagan merchant, but she did not complain or feel sorry for herself. She accepted everything, and performed the most humble tasks with wonderful [...]
St. Rita of Cascia, Saint of the Impossible, led a life of many trials. Yet, during that life she also achieved many significant triumphs. She is also known as the ‘Peacemaker of Jesus’ for her many good deeds. She was the only child born to Antonio and Amata Lotti in a tiny hamlet near Cascia, [...]
Like Blessed Miguel Agustín Pro, S.J., St. Cristóbal and his 24 companion martyrs lived under a very anti-Catholic government in Mexico, one determined to weaken the Catholic faith of its people. Churches, schools and seminaries were closed; foreign clergy were expelled. Cristóbal established a clandestine seminary at Totatiche, Jalisco. Magallanes and the other priests were [...]
In the year 1400, a young man came to the door of the largest hospital in Siena. A plague was raging through the city so horrible that as many as twenty people died each day just in the hospital alone. And many of the people who died were those who were needed to tend the [...]
Pentecost Sunday is one of the most ancient feasts of the Church, celebrated early enough to be mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles (20:16) and St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (16:8). It is the 50th day after Easter (if we count both Easter and Pentecost), and it supplants the Jewish feast of [...]
Little is known of John’s life before he took office as pope, except that he was born in Tuscany and that his father was Constantius. He was elected a week after the death of his predecessor Hormisdas. Thanks to the recent reunification of the Eastern and Western Churches under Hormisdas, relations were very good with [...]
From his childhood Saint Paschal seems to have been marked out for the service of God. Amid his daily labors as a shepherd, he found time to instruct and evangelize the rude herdsmen who kept their flocks on the hills of Aragon. At the age of twenty-four he entered the reformed Franciscan Order near the [...]
St. Brendan of Ardfert and Clonfert, known also as Brendan the Voyager, was born in Ciarraighe Luachra, near the present city of Tralee, County Kerry, Ireland, in 484; he died at Enachduin, now Annaghdown, in 577. He was baptized at Tubrid, near Ardfert, by Bishop Erc. For five years he was educated under St. Ita, [...]
When he was barely old enough to wield a hoe, St. Isidore entered the service of John de Vergas, a wealthy landowner from Madrid, and worked faithfully on his estate outside the city for the rest of his life. He married a young woman as simple and upright as himself who also became a saint—Maria [...]
