Daily Saints

Saint Joan of the Cross

Born in 1666, in Anjou, France, Joan worked in the family business—a small shop near a religious shrine—from an early age. She has become known to be greed and insensitive to the poor. One day she was touched by the strange woman who claimed she was on intimate terms with the deity. Joan became a new person. She began caring for needy children. Then the poor, elderly, and sick came to her. Over time, she closed the family business so she could devote herself fully to good works and penance.

She went on to found what came to be known as the Congregation of Saint Anne of Providence. It was then she took the religious name of Joan of the Cross. By the time of her death in 1736 she had founded 12 religious houses, hospices, and schools. Pope John Paul II canonized her in 1982.

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Saint Roch

Daily Saints

Saint Roch is the patron saint of the sick and invalids. He was born in 1295 to a rich family in Montpellier, France. Tradition says Saint Roch was born with a birthmark of a red cross on his chest. He joined the Franciscan Order and distributed his fortune among the poor. While living in Italy, he caught the plague while ministering to the sick and was expelled from the town. Ill and starving, he was saved when a hunting dog found him and brought him bread every day.

He recovered and decided to devote himself to caring for the sick. After his recovery, Saint Roch returned to Montpellier, France. His uncle, the governor, did not recognize him and cast him into prison as a spy. After five years in the prison, he died, stretched out on the ground and after receiving the Last Sacraments.

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Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Daily Saints

The Catholic Church teaches as dogma that the Virgin Mary “having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.” This doctrine was dogmatically defined by Pope Pius XII on November 1, 1950, in the Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus Deus, while exercising papal infallibility. But Pope Pius was not declaring the belief in the Assumption as something new or novel. There is written evidence of the belief as early as the 4th century in text that covers several different languages and a fairly wide geographical dispersion. Teaching of the Assumption of Mary became widespread across the Christian world, having been celebrated liturgically as early as the 5th century in the East.

It was celebrated in the West under Pope Sergius I in the 8th century and Pope Leo IV then confirmed the feast as official. Theological debate about the Assumption continued, following the Reformation, climaxing in 1950 when Pope Pius XII defined it as dogma for the Catholic Church. In the Eastern Orthodox churches, the Assumption is referred as the Dormition of the Theotokos (a Greek word literally meaning “God bearer”). Notice that the belief leaves open the question of Mary’s natural death.

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Saint Maximilian Kolbe

Daily Saints

Our saint today Raymund Kolbe was born on January 8, 1894, in the Kingdom of Poland, part of the Russian Empire. He entered the seminary of the Conventual Franciscans in Lvív- then Poland which is now Part of Ukraine. Though he achieved doctorates in Philosophy and Theology, he was deeply interested in science, the he even drew plans for rocket ships. At the young age of 24, he was ordained. He is the founder of the Militia de Immaculata, whose aim was to fight and combat evil with the witness of the good life, prayer, work, and suffering. When, Maximilian was on the last hours of his life. He lifted his fleshless arm to receive the bite of the hypodermic needle. It was filled with carbolic acid. They burned his body with all the others. Fr. Kolbe was beatified in 1971 and was canonized in 1982.

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Sts. Pontian and Hippolytus

Daily Saints

Hippolytus was a priest and a learned man, the most important writer of the Church at Rome in the early third century. He strongly attacked the popes of the time, and was set up as a rival Pope to St Callistus. Some time later, in Maximin’s persecution, he was sent to labour in the quarries of Sardinia. There he met the then Pope, Pontian, and was reconciled with him.

Pontian was made Pope in 231, and was sent to the quarries in 235, where he resigned the papacy and died. Pontian’s successor, Fabian, had both bodies brought back to Rome for burial, and Pontian and Hippolytus were already being venerated by the Roman Church by the start of the fourth century.

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Saint Jane Frances de Chantal

Daily Saints

Jane Frances was wife, mother, nun, and a foundress of a religious community. Her mother died when she was 18 months old, and her father, head of parliament at Dijon, France, became the main influence on her education. Jane developed into a woman of beauty and refinement, lively and cheerful in temperament. At 21, she married Baron de Chantal, by whom she had six children, three of whom died in infancy. When her husband died, she placed herself under the guidance of St. Francis de Sales and progressed rapidly along the way of perfection. She performed many good works for the poor and the sick. She founded the Order of the Visitation and guided it wisely. She died while on a visitation of convents of the community in 1641.

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Saint Clare of Assisi

Daily Saints

She was born at Assisi and came under the influence of Saint Francis. She left home at the age of 18 and, under Francis’s guidance, began a community that grew to become the order of the Poor Clares (she was later joined both by her sister and by her widowed mother). In its radical attachment to poverty the Rule of the order was much more severe than that of any other order of nuns. They also live a life of austerity and complete seclusion from the world.

St. Francis obliged Clare under obedience to accept being the abbess, she exercised the office until her last earthly breath. Clare was a noted contemplative and a caring mother to her nuns. She died at Assisi in 1253.

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Saint Laurence

Daily Saints

Laurence was one of the seven deacons of the Church of Rome and was executed on 10th August 258, four days after Sixtus II and his companions. By now, few of the facts of his life are known for certain: he was probably a Spaniard from Toledo.

A basilica was built over Laurence’s tomb fifty years after his death, by the Emperor Constantine, and the anniversary of his martyrdom was kept as a solemn feast – with considerably more solemnity than that of Pope Sixtus II (reason unknown). By the sixth century, it was one of the most important feasts throughout much of western Christendom. His name occurs (with Sixtus’s) in the Roman Canon of the Mass.

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Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

Daily Saints

Edith Stein was born from a prominent Jewish family in Breslau, Germany – now Wroclaw, Polad. As a student, she became fascinated in Philosophy, specifically Phenomenology. Excelling as a protégé of the famous philosopher, Edmund Husserl, she earned a Doctorate in Philosophy in 1916, but her academic career was impeded because she was a woman.

Reading the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Ávila brought about her conversion to Catholicism and she was baptized on 1 January 1922.

She entered a Carmelite monastery in Cologne and took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Her order moved her to the Netherlands to keep her safe from the growing Nazi threat. But later on, she was taken to Auschwitz and killed on 9 August 1942.

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Saint Dominic

Daily Saints

Dominic was born in old Castile, Spain. He was trained for the priesthood by his uncle-priest, he studied and mastered arts and theology. Later on, he became a canon of the Cathedral at Osma, there an the revival of the apostolic common life described in Acts of the Apostles was attempted. In 1216 he founded the Order of Preachers, dedicated to saving souls by preaching and persuasion.

His ideal, and that of his order, i.e., contemplate trader [to pass on the fruits of contemplation] was to organically link a life with God, study and prayer in all forms, with a ministry of salvation to people by the Word of God.
Dominic died at Bologna on 6th of August 1221.

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Saint Joan of the Cross

Saint Roch

Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Saint Maximilian Kolbe

Sts. Pontian and Hippolytus

Saint Jane Frances de Chantal

Saint Clare of Assisi

Saint Laurence

Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

Saint Dominic

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