St. Peter Damian is a Doctor of the Church. He was the youngest of a large, poor family in Ravenna, Italy and was orphaned at a very young age. One of his brothers took Peter under his wing and sent him to school. Peter did very well in his classes and became a famous teacher in Parma and...
Saint of the Day
Francisco, 11, and Jacinta, 10, are the youngest non-martyrs to be beatified in the history of the Church. The brother and sister, who tended to their families’ sheep with their cousin Lucia Santo in the fields of Fatima, Portugal, witnessed the apparitions of Mary, now commonly known as Our...
A relative of Jesus', possibly a first cousin. He is in the Gospel of Matthew, and is one of the brethren of Christ mentioned in Acts who was present at the birth of the Church on the first Pentecost.
Reported to have been at the martyrdom of Saint James the Lesser, he was chosen to...
These seven men were born in Florence, Italy and led lives as hermits on Monte Senario. They had a special devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.
On Friday, April 13, 1240, the hermits received a vision of Our Lady. She held in her hand a black habit, and a nearby angel bore a scroll reading...
Bishop of Ephesus and Martyr. Onesimus was a Phrygian by birth and a slave to Philemon, a person of influence who had been converted to the faith by Saint Paul. Having offended his master and been obliged to flee, he sought out Saint Paul, then a prisoner for the faith at Rome. The Apostle...
Claude de la Colombiere was born to an extremely devout family in 1641 in a small town in the diocese of Grenoble, France.
In 1650 Claude went to Lyon to attend a junior college run by Jesuits. When he was 17, Claude felt a call to religious life and entered the Jesuit novitiate house in...
The Ricci are an ancient family in Tuscany. Catherine was born at Florence in 1522, and called at her baptism Alexandrina, but she took the name of Catherine at her religious profession. Having lost her mother in her infancy, when she was between six and seven years old, her father placed her...
St. Julian the Hospitaller, or "the Poor Man," came from a wealthy, noble family in the early 4th century and is a popular saint in Western Europe. According to a legend, Julian had just recently been married and was a jealous husband. One day when Julian was hunting, he had a vision that he...
In 1858, in the grotto of Massabielle, near Lourdes in southern France, Our Lady appeared 18 times to Bernadette Soubirous, a young peasant girl.She revealed herself as the Immaculate Conception, asked that a chapel be built on the site of the vision, and told the girl to drink from a fountain...
St. Apollonia was a holy virgin who suffered martyrdom in Alexandria during a local uprising against the Christians in the early 3rd century. Her martyrdom came just before the persecution of Decius (248-249).
During festivities commemorating the founding of the Roman Empire, a mob began...