(Feast day ~ April 3) A writer of sacred music would hardly have been expected to lead anything approaching an adventuresome, perhaps stormy life. Yet that was precisely the kind of life led by one of the foremost writers of religious music. On the contrary, his life encompassed the controversial, the daring, and the adventuresome… […]

(Feast Day ~ April 2) Mary of Egypt left her parents when she was twelve years of age. It was during the reign of the Emperor Justin. She entered Alexandria, and was a sinner in that city for seventeen years. Having visited Jerusalem, and, it being the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, […]

(Feast Day ~ April 1) Just as the images from a powerful telescope or from a spacecraft orbiting the earth can give us fleeting glimpses of God’s creation that exists beyond our planet, when we look back in history, we have fleeting glimpses of what life was like for Christians in the first several centuries […]

(Feast Day ~ March 31) He was a linguist, a teacher, a writer, a craftsman, a scientist, a world traveler, a family man. While this could be a description of a “Renaissance” man such as a Galileo or da Vinci, these terms also describe St. Innocent, “Enlightener of the Aleuts and Apostle to America” who […]

(Feast Day ~ March 30) According to the ways of the world, in order to have great influence, one must be a prominent statesmen, a talented actor or athlete, a wealthy merchant, or a technological genius. But according to the ways of God, it is often the quiet saint, the reclusive monk, who has the […]

(Feast Day ~ March 27) It is difficult for American Christians to imagine the restrictions experienced by those living under hostile, non-Christian rulers. In our increasingly “multi-cultural” society, all religions practiced within our borders are given equal protection under the law and discrimination on religious grounds is illegal. Americans are free to worship whomever and […]

(Feast Day ~ March 21) Two hundred years after St. Anthony followed the Gospel admonition to sell all that he had and follow Christ to a life of asceticism in the Egyptian desert, another was born whose decision to lead this same life has had a lasting influence through all the centuries since then. Twins […]

Feast Day ~ March 21 Not many people would take the words of our Lord Jesus Christ so literally and have it impact their lives so dramatically as did the Apostles, who left all and followed Him [Mark 10:28-30]. Most Christians would be willing to give a portion of their income to the Church or […]

(Feast Day ~ March 20th) The story of St. Cuthbert must be told in two remarkable chapters – one of his lifetime of holiness, and the other of the centuries following his death. The son (born c. 634) of Anglo-Saxon Christian parents living in the north of England, Cuthbert experienced a miraculous occurrence while still […]

(Feast Day ~ March 19) Like so many saints who have stepped onto the world’s “stage” for a brief period and then disappeared from the records, St. Joseph is one about whom we have only the bare facts. He appears in Holy Scripture from prior to the birth of our Lord until the 12-year-old Jesus […]