Blog

    Stories of saints, biblical events, angels, and sacred places.

    An engraving of a mitred, haloed bishop with a long beard gesturing downward toward a kneeling tonsured friar beside a column, with a Latin banner reading "Vocatis hunc bovem mutum" between them.
    Saint Albert the Great
    A Dominican teacher predicted his silent, mocked student would "bellow so loud" his teaching filled the world — the student was Thomas Aquinas.
    An engraving of an elderly, balding Jesuit brother kneeling in prayer with tears on his face, hands clasped, gazing up at a vision of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child in the clouds above him.
    Saint Alphonsus Rodriguez
    A ruined widower joined the Jesuits at 40 as a lay brother and spent 46 years answering the monastery door — believing every knock might be Christ.
    A tempera panel painting of a haloed, white-bearded hermit monk in a rose-and-black habit standing in a bare, wintry landscape with dead trees and grazing deer, a small monastery visible in the distance.
    Saint Anthony the Great
    A rich young Egyptian heard one Gospel line read aloud, took it literally, and walked into the desert — becoming the reason monasticism exists at all.
    An oval engraving of a haloed, tonsured abbot kneeling before a column hung with a cross and instruments, holding a banner inscribed with a Latin prayer, a walled town visible behind him.
    Saint Bernard of Clairvaux
    A 22-year-old talked 30 friends and relatives into a struggling new monastery — and 33 years later preached a crusade so effectively the cloth ran out.
    A 17th-century engraving of a huge sea monster with masted ships anchored along its scaly back and monks gathered around a small shipboard altar and cross, while a haloed figure and companions look on from a rowboat below.
    Saint Brendan the Navigator
    Irish monks told of Brendan sailing the Atlantic in a leather boat and saying Mass on an island that turned out to be a whale — legend, not history.
    A photograph of a sculpted model of a bald, robed monk standing with arms crossed over his chest and head bowed in contemplation.
    Saint Bruno of Cologne
    A renowned theology teacher quit over his archbishop's corruption, then led six companions into an Alpine valley to found an order that still exists today.
    A pen-and-wash drawing of a bearded, kneeling priest tenderly holding the infant Jesus, who reaches toward him, while the Virgin Mary and two cherubs look on from clouds above.
    Saint Cajetan
    A nobleman-turned-priest in famine-stricken Naples built an interest-free lending fund to fight loan sharks preying on the poor — it became the Bank of Naples.
    A close-up devotional portrait of a young, wide-eyed prince wearing a jeweled red-and-gold crown, from a traditional 16th-century painting of Saint Casimir.
    Saint Casimir of Poland
    At 13, a Polish prince marched off to seize a foreign throne for his father. The campaign collapsed in disgrace, and he never took up arms or a crown again.
    A medieval illuminated manuscript miniature showing a kneeling monk washing the feet of a haloed, hooded figure seated beneath an arched building, from a 12th-century copy of Bede's Life of Saint Cuthbert.
    Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne
    A hermit-bishop so devoted to seabirds a duck still carries his name — and whose reportedly incorrupt body became the reason Durham Cathedral exists.
    A hand-colored 19th-century engraving of Bishop Eugène de Mazenod in episcopal dress standing before the hillside basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde in Marseille.
    Saint Eugene de Mazenod
    An aristocratic child fled the French Revolution and grew up poor in exile. He grew up to found a missionary order for society's most abandoned people.
    A close, somber portrait of a gray-haired, bearded Spanish priest in a black cloak with a white collar, gazing slightly to the side.
    Saint John of Avila
    A descendant of Jewish converts became the Counter-Reformation's great spiritual director — personally advising both Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Ávila.
    A hand-colored 15th-century woodcut showing a young woman fallen on the ice while other women help her up, with a walled Dutch town and other skaters in the background.
    Saint Lydwine of Schiedam
    A single skating accident at 15 left a Dutch teenager disabled for 37 years. The Church later named her patron saint of the very sport that broke her.
    A black-and-white photograph of Titus Brandsma wearing round glasses and the academic robe and chain of office of rector magnificus of the Catholic University of Nijmegen.
    Saint Titus Brandsma
    At 60, a Carmelite priest hand-delivered a letter ordering Catholic newspapers to defy Nazi propaganda orders. He was dead within five months.
    A gilded statue of a bishop wearing a mitre and holding a crozier in one hand and a small model of a church in the other.
    Saint Virgil of Salzburg
    Popular legend says he was tried for heresy over a round Earth. The real dispute was far stranger — whether people on its far side could ever be saved.
    A gold-ground icon showing a large group of nude, haloed martyrs standing together on a frozen lake beneath a blessing figure of Christ and rows of descending crowns.
    Forty Martyrs of Sebaste
    Forty Roman soldiers were left naked on a frozen lake overnight, with a heated bath in sight to tempt them into recanting their faith. All forty held firm.
    A dramatic Baroque oil painting of Roman soldiers seizing infants from screaming mothers beneath a stormy sky, with two angels holding martyrs' palms watching from the clouds above.
    The Holy Innocents
    Herod ordered every baby boy under two in Bethlehem killed to eliminate a rival he'd never seen. Matthew's Gospel records it — Christ had already escaped.
    A late-19th-century engraved portrait of Kabaka Mwanga II of Buganda, the king whose court order led to the execution of Charles Lwanga and his companions.
    Saint Charles Lwanga
    A royal page in a Ugandan king's court shielded younger boys from the king's demands and led them in refusing to renounce their new faith. He was burned alive.
    A 19th-century stained-glass window at the Abbey of Bobbio depicting Saint Columban haloed, in a white monk's habit, holding a book inscribed "Christi simus non nostri" with a dove resting near his shoulder.
    Saint Columban
    An Irish monk told a Frankish king his mistresses disqualified him from ruling, got expelled for it, and went on founding monasteries across Europe anyway.
    A relief carving on a wall in St. Gallen, Switzerland, inscribed "ST. GALLUS A.D. 612," showing the saint in a monk's habit pointing toward a bear that is standing on its hind legs beside a fire.
    Saint Gall
    Too sick to keep traveling with Columbanus, an Irish monk stayed behind by a Swiss lake and founded a hermitage that grew into one of Europe's great libraries.
    A 17th-century engraving of Saint John de Britto dressed as a Tamil ascetic, holding a pilgrim's staff and water pot, with a scene of his arrest and martyrdom depicted in the background.
    Saint John de Britto
    A Portuguese Jesuit missionary lived as a Tamil holy man rather than a European priest — until a convert's discarded wife's angry family had him beheaded.