Feast Day: May 7   We have all no doubt heard that a tree can be known by its fruit. However, if we do not pay attention to the fruit, it will be more difficult to diagnose the health of the tree and to respond accordingly. The same is true of the life of holiness. [...]

Feast Day: April 8 “Blessed are the merciful for they shall receive mercy.” This beatitude calls each Christian to be an instrument of God’s mercy in the world. It is for this reason that the Church has traditionally articulated the Christian duty to engage in both corporal and spiritual works of mercy. This mercy is [...]

Feast Day: March 2  St. Angela of the Cross (1846- 1932) founded the Institute of the Sisters of the Company of the Cross in Seville, Spain, and had established more than 20 convents by the time of her death. Known for her humility, Mother Angela, as she was called, lived a life of contemplative prayer [...]

Feast Day: February 8 Claim to fame: Josephine Bakhita was born in Sudan in 1869 and kidnapped when she was 7 years old and sold into slavery. The girl was so traumatized by the experience that she was unable to remember her name and her captors gave her the name Bakhita, which means “fortunate one.” [...]

St. Giuseppe Maria Tommasi Feast Day: Jan. 1   We live in a culture obsessed with the “new,” with a predictable anti-tradition attitude that dismisses the past as outdated and equates anything that appears “old” with staleness and irrelevance. Progress demands a complete rupture with the past and is to be favored at all cost, [...]

St. John of the Cross Feast Day: Dec. 14    St. John of the Cross, born Juan de Yepes Álvarez, (June 24, 1542 – Dec. 14, 1591) holds the title of Doctor of the Church. He was a Carmelite friar and priest, a mystic and a major figure of the Counter-Reformation. His writings and poetry, [...]

St. Martin de Porres Feast: Nov. 3      St. Martin de Porres (Dec. 9, 1579 – Nov. 3, 1639) was a lay Dominican brother from Lima, Peru. He was known to have been given many miraculous gifts such as levitation, bilocation, healing and even the ability to communicate with animals. However, his greatest witness [...]

Though each lived in different periods, four saintly women’s lives hold valuable lessons for living out the vocation to be holy.

Blessed Teresa of Calcutta
Feast: September 5
Blessed Teresa, or Mother Teresa, (Aug. 26, 1910 – Sept. 5, 1997) was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Albania. Her life changed forever in 1946 during a train ride, when she received her “inspiration, her call within a call.” She was seized by Jesus’ thirst for love and for souls and the desire to quench this thirst became the purpose of her life. She responded by establishing the Missionaries of Charity, who were dedicated to the service of the poorest of the poor.