Stephen Harding, an Englishman, was returning from a pilgrimage to Rome when he came upon a community of monks living an austere life in small huts in Molesme, France.

Though Carson made no explicit reference to faith, she was moved by a deep sense of wonder and respect for the earth and its creatures—and a conviction that humans must not ignore their own fragile bonds with nature.

Marc Chagall was born to a Hasidic Jewish family in a town in Belarus, part of the Russian Empire. Determined to become an artist, he moved to Paris, where his distinctive style drew on various modernist influences.

In 2015, the Vatican decreed that Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador had died as a martyr “in hatred of the faith,” opening the way for his beatification, and ultimately his canonization in 2018.

Until 1962, the life of Fannie Lou Hamer was little different from that of her parents or other poor Black women in the Mississippi Delta.

“The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity,” an account of the martyrdom of a prosperous young woman and her servant in Carthage, is one of the most powerful and poignant documents of the early Church.

In every encounter he devoted his full attention, imparting the conviction that each person and each moment in life is precious.

In 1933 Michael Sopocko, a priest and professor of moral theology, was assigned as confessor to a small community of nuns in Vilnius (then in Poland). There he met a young nun named Mary Faustina Kowalska, who worked in the garden.

Miguel Febres Cordero, the first saint of Ecuador, was born with misshapen legs that made it difficult for him to walk properly.