Servant of God Walter Ciszek was a missionary priest, political prisoner, professor, retreat master, author, and spiritual director. Walter was born in 1904 in the small coal-mining town of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. His parents, Martin and Mika Ciszek, were hard working, poor Polish immigrants. Tough guy from the start From early...

St. Martin de Porres was a religious brother, a mystic, and a man of extraordinary charity. Martin was born to an unmarried woman, Anna Velasquez, in 1579 in Lima, Peru. Anna was a freed slave. Martin’s father, Juan de Porres, was a Spanish noble. He initially denied paternity of the...

. By Sarah Bedia Her life of heroic virtue is a reminder that very ordinary people can become saints. Blessed Chiara Badano, (1971-1990), was an ordinary Italian teenager with an extraordinary spiritual strength. Ruggero and Maria Teresa Badano struggled with infertility for the first eleven years of their marriage. They...

. By Sarah Bedia St. Stanislaus Papczynski was a priest, military chaplain, and a founder of a religious order.  John (Jan) was born in 1631 in the small village of Podegrodzie in southern Poland.  His father Tomasz was the bailiff for the village and a blacksmith, and John had seven...

St. Helena was a wife and mother, an empress, a patroness, and a very influential person in Church history.  Little is known of her early life, but she is believed to have been born around the year 250.  She was from Bithynia in Asia Minor, an area in northern modern-day...