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

    A Baroque painting showing a barefoot Franciscan friar, Saint Peter of Alcantara, standing with two walking staffs before a kneeling group of witnesses during one of his reported miracles.
    Saint Peter of Alcantara
    A friar who reportedly slept 90 minutes a night once told Teresa of Ávila, almost in passing, about the time a snowstorm's falling snow refused to bury him alive.
    A Baroque painting of Saint Romuald, shown seated at right in a white monastic habit, addressing a gathered group of fellow hermit monks.
    Saint Romuald
    A nobleman spent forty days doing penance for his father's crime, then couldn't stop founding stricter monasteries — including one still followed today.
    A gilded Russian Orthodox icon of Saint Seraphim of Sarov, an elderly monk with a long white beard, wearing a dark habit and an embroidered stole marked with crosses, set against an ornate gold background.
    Saint Seraphim of Sarov
    In a snow-covered Russian forest in 1831, a monk took his disciple by the shoulders and, by that disciple's own sworn account, became too bright to look at.
    A black-and-white portrait photograph of Charles de Foucauld in later life, bearded and wearing the plain white habit of his desert hermitage.
    Blessed Charles de Foucauld
    A cavalry officer who lived for pleasure and food became a Sahara hermit who prayed alone at a desert fort — until raiders shot him dead at his own door.
    A painted portrait of Dom Columba Marmion, Abbot of Maredsous, in black Benedictine monastic habit with a skullcap, gazing to one side.
    Blessed Columba Marmion
    A Dublin priest dreamed of mission work in Australia. He never got there — instead, from a Belgian abbey, he became one of the century's most read spiritual writers.
    A black-and-white group photograph of seminarians and pastors standing outside a large house, taken at the Confessing Church's underground seminary at Sigurdshof, where Dietrich Bonhoeffer trained ordinands; Bonhoeffer is among those pictured.
    Dietrich Bonhoeffer
    A Lutheran pastor hanged at Flossenbürg weeks before Germany's surrender is honored across denominations as a modern martyr — though not as a Catholic saint.
    A Renaissance fresco of the Annunciation showing the Archangel Gabriel kneeling before the Virgin Mary in a simple arcaded loggia, painted directly on a monastery cell wall.
    Blessed Fra Angelico
    A Dominican friar painted some of the Renaissance's finest frescoes where almost no one would ever see them — inside his brothers' private prayer cells.
    A folk devotional oil painting of Blessed Henry Suso as a haloed Dominican friar in black and white habit, holding a rosary, with a rose garland, an angel playing a viol, and the Christ child in a rose tree beside him.
    Blessed Henry Suso
    A teenage friar fell in love with what he called Eternal Wisdom, personified as a bride, and wrote a medieval bestseller second only to The Imitation of Christ.
    A 14th-century illuminated manuscript miniature showing Jan van Ruusbroec, seated beneath a tree with a dove overhead, writing on a wax tablet while a fellow canon copies his text at a writing desk nearby.
    Blessed Jan van Ruusbroec
    A Paris theologian accused his mystical writing of pantheism; Ruusbroec insisted he meant union in love, not of essence — a real medieval dispute, not folklore.
    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.