Saint Felix of Valois was a hermit and a co-founder (with Saint John of Matha) of the Trinitarian Order. Butler says that Felix was born in 1127. He was surnamed Valois because he was a native of the province of Valois. Tradition holds that he renounced his possessions and retired to a dense forest in the Diocese of Meaux, where he gave himself to prayer and contemplation. Much later sources...

Saint Agnes of Assisi, O.S.C., was the younger sister of Saint Clare of Assisi and one of the first abbesses of the Order of Poor Ladies (now the Poor Clares). She was a younger daughter of Count Favorino Scifi. Her birth name was probably Caterina; she took the name of Agnes when she became a nun. Her mother, Ortolana, who also would join the Order founded by her daughters, belonged to the...

When Odo, a cleric at Tours, read The Rule of St. Benedict, he was stunned. Judging that his Christian life did not measure up to Benedict’s standard, he determined to become a monk. In 909, Odo went to Beaume, a reformed monastery where the rule was strictly observed, and Abbot Berno received him into the community. That same year Berno started a new monastery at Cluny in Burgundy. He...

Zacchaeus was a chief tax-collector at Jericho, mentioned only in the Gospel of Luke. A descendant of Abraham, he was an example of Jesus's personal, earthly mission to bring salvation to the lost. Tax collectors were despised as traitors (working for the Roman Empire, not for their Jewish community), and as being corrupt. Because the lucrative production and export of balsam was centered...

St. Gertrude the Great (1256-1302), also known as Gertrude of Helfta, was born on the feast of Epiphany in Thuringia (modern Germany). She was sent to be educated at the Benedictine monastery in Helfta at the age of four or five, possibly as an orphan or as a child dedicated to God by her parents. She proved to be an extremely bright and determined student who became engrossed in her secular...