St. Francis of Assisi - The Reformer

Rebuild my Church! That’s the mission Christ gave to St. Francis and it’s the perennial task of the Church in every age of its life. But how is the reform and renewal of the Church to be accomplished? The life of St. Francis demonstrates that Christ intends...

St. Thomas Aquinas - The Theologian

The relationship of faith and reason is under intense scrutiny in an age beholden to the competing claims of fundamentalism and secularism. So called “new atheists” insist that the claims of religion amount to mere superstition, a retrograde holdover from a ...

St. Catherine of Siena - The Mystic

Is the physical world all there is? Is science the only path to ascertaining truth? St. Catherine of Siena witnesses to a higher world beyond the material. Though the fourteenth century mystic never studied theology, and never learned how to read or write, h...

St. John Henry Newman - The Convert

Is there any truth in matters of religion? Should the Church simply retreat in the face of the challenges of culture? John Henry Newman came into the Church as a convert and used his prodigious intellectual gifts to help the Church better understand its identi...

G.K. Chesterton - The Evangelist

How does one engage a culture that is befuddled by Christ and suspicious of the Church? The life and witness of this nineteenth century literary convert shows that the fundamental disposition of effective evangelization is joy, and life in Christ is a day-to-da...

Michelangelo - The Artist

The master of sculpture and painting is not a saint but serves as the privileged representative of the creative potential engendered by the Catholic Faith. The Church professes that beauty is a route of access to God, and through humanity’s creative artistry we glimp...

Bartolomé de las Casas is one of the most powerfully prophetic figures in the history of the Catholic Church. A witness to the terrible destruction of the indigenous peoples of the newly discovered Americas, he became a thorn in the side of the complacent, passionately advocating for human dignit...

Ad maiorem Dei gloriam (To the greater glory of God) is the motto asso­ciated with St. Ignatius of Loyola and the order that he founded, the Society of Jesus. His passion to become a courtier, soldier, and advisor to royalty became, under the influence of grace, a passion to serve Christ—all the ...