Elisa Angela Meneguzzi, who took the name Liduina in religious life, was born to a peasant family in northern Italy. At fourteen she entered domestic service, working for the next…

St. Leonard, who was born in Port Maurice in Italy, joined the Franciscans when he was twenty-one, hoping to spend his life preaching the Gospel in China. In the end,…

At a time when slavery was still the law of the land in the southern United States, Henriette DeLille founded a congregation for “free women of color” in New Orleans.…

The decade of the 1980s that began in El Salvador with the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, ended on November 16, 1989, with the slaughter of the Jesuit community of…

Bishop Paride Taban was born in Katire, Sudan, to a Christian mother. His father, a Muslim, was arrested before his birth. Upon his release and finding his wife pregnant, he…

Marcellus was a centurion in the Roman army, serving in the city of Tangier in North Africa. During a feast in honor of the emperor’s birthday, he suddenly threw down…

Maura O’Halloran, who was born to a large Catholic family in Boston and raised in Ireland, displayed from a young age a deep compassion for human suffering. After graduating from…

St. Teresa, one of the towering figures of all Christian history, was the daughter of a wealthy Spanish merchant. Though she became a nun at twenty, her vocation initially had…

Among the heroes of the Holocaust, the German industrialist Oskar Schindler cuts a curious figure. Not a man of evident faith or even conventional virtue, he was in fact an…

Thérèse Martin, a young French Carmelite, died of tuberculosis on October 1, 1897, at the age of twenty-four, only nine years after entering the convent in Lisieux. Her short life…