St. Colman may have been of noble or royal birth. He was monk. While on a pilgrimage to the Holy Lands, Colman was stopped by the Viennese on suspicion of being a Moravian spy; there was continual fighting between Austria, Moravia and Bohemia, and a stranger who spoke no German was immediately suspect. With no evidence other than being a stranger, he was convicted of espionage, tortured, and...

Our Lady of Mount Carmel, or Virgin of Carmel, is the title given to the Blessed Virgin Mary in her role as patroness of the Carmelite Order, particularly within the Catholic Church. The first Carmelites were Christian hermits living on Mount Carmel in the Holy Land during the late 12th and early to mid-13th century. They built in the midst of their hermitages a chapel which they dedicated to...

A band of forty Spanish, Portugese and French Jesuit missionaries martyred by the Huguenot pirate Jacques Sourie while en route to Brazil. They are Aleixo Delgado, Alonso de Baena, Alvaro Borralho Mendes, Amaro Vaz, André Gonçalves, António Correia, Antônio Fernandes, António Soares, Bento de Castro, Brás Ribeiro, Diogo de Andrade, Diogo Pires Mimoso, Domingos Fernandes, Esteban Zuraire,...

Cluniac monk born in Regensburg, Germany, 1029,  and died in Zell, Germany, July 14, 1093. He was a godson of Emperor Henry III, Ulric was trained and educated in the Abbey of Sankt Emmeram, served in the court chapel of the emperor, and came to be archdeacon and provost in Freising. Ulric took part in the emperor's march on Rome (1046) and then made a pilgrimage to Palestine. On his...

Carlos was the second of five children born to Manuel Baudilio Rodriguez and Herminia Santiago; theirs was a pious family as one of his sisters was a Carmelite nun, and one brother a Benedictine monk, the first Puerto Rican to be an abbot. When Carlos was six years old, the family store and home were burned to the ground, and the Rodriguezes moved in with his mother's family. Carlos spent...