Above: Plaza Mayor de México (today Plaza del Zócalo), 1830 by Theubet de Beauchamp, showing the Mexico City Cathedral where San Felipe was baptised. On May 13, 1524, twelve Franciscan friars from Spain set foot on Mexican soil for the first time. The evangelization of Mexico had begun! According to Robert Ricard in The Spiritual Conquest…
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 man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men were sleeping, his enemy…
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 St. Patrick cupcakes three weeks ago. Besides the Polish paczkis for Fat Tuesday, St. Patrick’s…
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 saints, the feasts and fasts, the monuments in the life of Christ and His Church…
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 even among Catholics has also been a practice often relegated to “old-fashioned” Catholics—a quasi-superstitious holdover…
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 decades. Of course Protestants reject this doctrine, but also many (most?) Catholics manifest practical disbelief…
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 reward: St. Augustine, Bishop and Doctor of the Church (354-430). African by origin (he was…
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 a different obsession: to convert the Muslims to the one true faith, Catholicism. In 1219,…
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 against the Muslims), the assumption of most Catholics was that the Gospel had reached the…
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 Seton was the recently-widowed wife of an unsuccessful businessman, the mother of five children, and…
