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Help from the Saints in April
It is easy for the saints of the past to seem, well, out of date. After all, early Church martyrs and cloistered nuns didn’t have to deal with the problems we have today, right? Wrong. With a little effort, it’s easy to find at least one saint commemorated by the Church every day of April* […]
March: Befriending the saints
The difference between reading a biography of a living famous person and reading the biography of a deceased saint is that you can reasonably hope to befriend the saint! After all, our Lord has promised that those who love Him and keep his commandments can hope to spend eternity with Him, and the holy men […]
February: A preview of the saints of the month
There are thousands of saints in the calendar of the Catholic Church, which means that there are hundreds of saints every month. In my book about saints, I tried to make that number a bit more manageable by only including a few saints per day and limiting the descriptions of each one to a short […]
January 17: A saint to help us fight the battles of our modern age
The scandals and sins of our modern age seem so, well, modern, that we might be tempted to think that the examples of people from past ages cannot help us. After all, how would the people who lived millennia ago been able to help us find solutions to problems like sexual promiscuity, consumerism, and mockery […]
The Proclamation of Christmas
The Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ The Twenty-fifth Day of December, when ages beyond number had run their coursefrom the creation of the world, when God in the beginning created heaven and earth,and formed man in his own likeness; when century upon century had passedsince the Almighty set his bow in the clouds after […]
December: A brief history of saints in the Church
When our Lord died, He did not formally establish a canon of sacred writings, explicitly define canon law, or establish a process for the canonization of saints. He didn’t even write a Gospel. He established a Church to do that. Why God decided to put human beings in charge of these important matters is a […]
November 30: Become a saint like the great evangelizer, St. Andrew the Apostle
The Eastern Churches sometimes name him “the first called”, reminding us that it was the future Saint Andrew the Apostle and “the other disciple” (almost universally assumed to be Saint John the Evangelist) who first followed Jesus (see John 1:40). How the world would have changed if Andrew hadn’t listened when John the Baptist pointed […]
November 23: Become a family of saints like St. Felicitas’ family
On this date, the Church commemorates Saint Felicitas, a Catholic woman who died a martyr and was buried in the Cemetery of Maximus in Rome during the early centuries of the Church. That much is fairly certain. But there are other traditions associated with Saint Felicitas (also called Felicity). One tradition says that she was […]
November 16: Become a saint like St. Margaret of Scotland
Her life story as a young woman sounds so romantic it could be the plot-line for a Hollywood movie. Saint Margaret of Scotland (c. 1045-1093) was the daughter of an exiled English king. When her father returned to England and then died, she and her mother tried to escape to the safety of Europe. But […]
Date correction for November saints
The blogs posted for the month of November will follow each saint’s feast day—except for Blesseds Luigi and Maria. Those were inadvertently posted on November 9. The feast date of this holy couple is November 25. I apologize for the confusion.
November 9: Become married saints like the Quattrochis
Luigi Quattrochi (1880-1951) married Maria Corsini (1884-1965) in Rome, Italy, in 1905. During their more than four decades of marriage, Luigi became a lawyer, and Maria became a professor of education. Together, they had four children. When Pope John Paul II announced the beatification of this married couple, he declared that they had lived “an […]
November 3: Become a saint like St. Martin de Porres
In a year when racial injustice and “colonialism” have become hot topics, there is no better saint for Election Day than Saint Martin de Porres. Martin de Porres (1579-1639) was born the illegitimate child of a freed black slave and a Spanish knight in Lima, Peru. His father acknowledged that Martin and his sister were […]
Other resources on becoming a saint
Having All Saints’ Day fall on a Sunday has inspired many Catholic writers to write about how we can not only admire the saints but follow in their footsteps. Check out the following recent articles. Fr. Charles Fox at Catholic World Report: Our vocation to holiness and the wonderful variety of the saints Fr. Bevil […]
Every Catholic’s goal for November 1: Become a saint
Although the Church commemorates individual saints on particular dates throughout the year—typically on the date of the saint’s death—the Church gathers all the saints together for one big celebration on November 1. According to the Martyrologium Romanum, the official calendar of saints for the Church, there are twenty individual saints and blesseds remembered on this […]
Saint Therese of Lisieux: Day 9
In 1997, Pope John Paul II named Saint Therese of Lisieux a Doctor of the Church. This was a startling decision. Perhaps since Saint John Paul II made many startling decisions during his pontificate—such as suddenly adding five mysteries to the rosary—it is easy to fail to notice how unusual this decision really was. Other […]
Saint Therese of Lisieux: Day 8
During Therese’s time as a Carmelite nun, she was ordered by her superiors to write her spiritual autobiography on three occasions. One of those superiors was her older sister, Pauline, who was also a Carmelite nun. Pauline knew her younger sister was not only holy but also gifted at explaining spiritual matters, and she obviously […]
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