Pope St. Pius V was a priest in religious life who became pope during one of the most tumultuous and critical periods in Church history. Antonio Ghislieri was born in 1504 at Bosco, near Alessandria, Italy. When he was fourteen, he joined the Dominican order and took the name Michele...
“The alarming increase of divorces in our land and the consequent break-up of family life is due principally to the loss of love for the ideal in womanhood. Marriage has become identified with pleasure, not with love. Once the pleasure ceases, love ceases. The woman is loved not for what...
“The truly blessed are not the ones who can work miracles or see angels; the truly blessed are the ones who can see their own sins.” St. Anthony the Egypt (3rd-4th centuries) “Therefore, rise, run to the Church; here is the Father, here is the Son, here is the...
Blessed Marcel Callo was a pious French layman who was a martyr of Nazi Germany. Marcel was born in 1921 to a devout couple of modest means, Marcel Callo and his wife Felicita. Young Marcel was one of nine children and the family lived at Rennes in western France. He...
“Let the young men also be blameless in all things, being especially careful to preserve purity, and keeping themselves, as with a bridle, from every kind of evil. For it is well that they should be cut off from the lusts that are in the world.” St. Polycarp of Smyrna...
St. Anne Line was a convert, wife and widow, and a martyr of Elizabethan Protestant England. She was born Alice Heigham c.1563 at Dunmow, Essex, England. Her father, Willaim Heigham, was a Calvinist landowner and was the son of one of King Henry VIII’s Protestant “reformers”. In her late teens,...
“[The Church] is called Catholic, then, because it extends over the whole world, from end to end of the earth, and because it teaches universally and infallibly each and every doctrine which must come to the knowledge of men concerning things visible and invisible…because it universally treats and heals every...
St. David Galván Bermúdez was a teacher, a priest, and a martyr of the Mexican Cristero War. David was born in 1881 in Guadalajara, in the state of Jalisco in western Mexico. His parents were José Galván and his wife Mariana Bermúdez and José operated a shoe store. Mariana died...
“Zeal for the salvation of souls is of so great a merit before God, that to give up all our goods to the poor, or to spend our whole life in the exercises of all sorts of austerities cannot equal the merit of it. There is no service more agreeable...
Blessed Niels Stensen was a brilliant scientist, Catholic convert, and devoted bishop and reformer. He was born to a Lutheran family in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1638. At the time of Niels’ birth, the long, complicated Thirty Years War was raging in much of Europe, including Denmark. Niels’ father, Sten Peterson,...