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...

Lucy Brocadelli (also known as the Blessed Lucy of Narni), (13 December 1476 in Narni – 15 November 1544 in Ferrara) was a Dominican tertiary who was famed as a mystic and a stigmatic. She has been venerated by the Roman Catholic Church since 1710. She is known for being the counselor of the Duke of Ferrara, for founding convents in two different and hostile city-states and for her...

St. Lawrence, it appears, was born about the year 1125. When only ten years old, his father delivered him up as a hostage to Dermod Mac Murehad, King of Leinster, who treated the child with great inhumanity, until his father obliged the tyrant to put him in the hands of the Bishop of Glendalough, in the county of Wicklow. The holy youth, by his fidelity in corresponding with the divine grace,...