The feast of the Holy Family, most often celebrated on the Sunday after Christmas, encourages us to imagine the setting in which Jesus spent his childhood years learning a trade from his father, Joseph, learning the sacred history of his people, learning how to pray and how to worship God.
Origen, the greatest theologian of the early Greek Church, was born to Christian parents in Alexandria, Egypt.
Virginia Centurione was born to a noble family of Genoa. Though she was attracted to religious life, her parents arranged for her marriage to Caspar Bracelli when she was fifteen.
St. Nicholas is one of the most popular of all saints: patron of Russia and Greece and of many classes of people, from children to prostitutes.
In his 2015 speech to Congress, Pope Francis included Dorothy Day among his list of four “great Americans” who offer a “new way of seeing and interpreting reality.”
Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in Hurley, New York. Her parents named her Isabella, a name she abandoned at forty-six when she took up her calling as a prophet and preacher.
Vinoba Bhave was widely regarded as the spiritual heir of Mahatma Gandhi. Born to a devout Brahmin family in Bombay, he had wavered in his youth between pursuing the life of a spiritual seeker or joining the resistance to British colonial rule
Though as a child she wished for nothing more than to become a Carmelite nun, Elizabeth Catez acceded to her mother’s condition—that she await her twenty-first birthday.
In November 1938 the Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany offered the world a brazen display of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Many Church officials turned a blind eye, but not Bernard Lichtenberg, provost of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral.
Clarence Jordan believed the most vital need for reconciliation in the South was between blacks and whites. At that time, such talk was considered dangerously radical.
