St. Cecilia (3rd c.) is one of the most venerated of the virgin martyrs of Rome. Her name is in the Roman Canon of the Mass. According to tradition she made a private vow of chastity to Jesus, yet her parents promised her in marriage to a suitor. On her wedding night, St. Cecilia told her husband that she had not only made a vow to remain a virgin, but that an angel guarded her purity. Her...

Son of an African immigrant named Valerius, Gelasius was known for his learning, charity and sense of justice. He opposed the Acacian and Manichaean heresies and came into conflict with the Patriarch of Constantinople over supremacy in Alexandria, Egypt and Antioch. He suppressed many of the Roman pagan festivals and ordered the reception of the Eucharist under both species, settling the...

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...