Above painting: St Catherine before the Pope at Avignon by Giovanni di Paolo (1403–1482), Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. In chapter thirteen of his Gospel, St. Matthew recounts a famous parable of the Lord: The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a …
Category: Saints & Tradition
Trads: We Need the Irish Fighting Spirit!
To Catholics in the Anglosphere – especially in Ireland and the United States – today’s feast day is something of a mark of the faith. As a Michigander I’m blessed to see the grocery stores in my area start selling …
The Illustrated Liturgical Year for Families
It takes saints to make saints. The liturgical year of the Church is filled with quite literally a priceless array of treasures that are all oriented to make it easier for us to get to Heaven. The commemorations of the …
St. Helen and Holy Relics
Holy relics are a distinctive feature of Catholicism. Would you expect to see the bones of some ancient martyr on display at your local Evangelical church? To most non-Catholics, holy relics are just plain weird. Sadly, veneration of holy relics …
St. Catherine of Genoa and Purgatory
We recently celebrated All Souls Day, in which we prayed for all the faithful departed to be released from purgatory and brought into the presence of God in Heaven. Yet belief in purgatory has fallen on hard times in recent …
Hasse’s Conversion of St. Augustine
It was on this day, 1590 years ago, that before the age of seventy six, in Hippo, today’s Bona in Algeria, a passionate seeker of truth, the most illustrious of the Fathers of the Western Church went to his eternal …
The Franciscan Protomartyrs and Interreligious Dialogue
The Franciscan order was founded at the height of the Crusading era. Political and religious leaders were consumed with a noble cause: to recover the Holy Land that had been taken centuries earlier by Muslim forces. St. Francis, however, had …
North American Martyrs and the Importance of Baptism
The religious impact of the discovery of the New World in the late 15th century cannot be overestimated. Although Catholic Europeans were aware of areas of the world that were not Christian (they had been involved in centuries of crusades …
Elizabeth Ann Seton and the Latin Mass
Note: This article is the first in a new series titled, “Saints & Tradition,” which will look at the ways in which the traditional practice of the Catholic faith has impacted the lives of the Saints. In 1804, Elizabeth Ann …