Little is known of the lives of saints Flora and Maria, aside from their deaths together on November 24, 851, in Cordova, Spain. Flora, born of a Mohammedan father and a Christian mother, practiced her Christian religion in secret, but, following the death of her parents, she was turned over to the authorities, the cadi, by her brother. When she would not denounce her religion, she was...

Columban (Columbanus) was the greatest of the Irish missionaries who worked on the European continent. As a young man who was greatly tormented by temptations of the flesh, he sought the advice of a religious woman who had lived a hermit’s life for years. He saw in her answer a call to leave the world. He went first to a monk on an island in Lough Erne, then to the great monastic seat of...

125 English, Scottish and Welsh Catholics were martyred during the persecutions by Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries. They are commemorated together on 22 November. Saint John Almond Saint Edmund Arrowsmith Saint Ambrose Barlow Saint John Boste Saint Alexander Briant Saint Edmund Campion Saint Margaret Clitherow Saint Philip Evans Saint Thomas Garnet Saint...

Bl. Maria Franciszka Siedliska (1842-1902) was born to a noble and wealthy family in Warsaw, Poland. When a Capuchin friar prepared her for her First Holy Communion, she began to desire the religious life and made a private act of consecration to God. Her father was greatly opposed and said he would rather see her dead then lost to the cloister. Her vocation was not deterred, and she went to...

Blessed Maria Fortunata Viti (1827–1922) was born in Italy, the eldest daughter of nine children. Her father had a gambling and alcohol addiction, and her mother died when she was 14 years old. Maria then cared for her younger siblings and worked as a housekeeper to earn money for the family as her father sunk deeper into his addiction. Maria rejected an offer for marriage, deciding...