Born in 1799 to Second Earl Spencer (whose descendants include Princess Diana), George Spencer studied at Cambridge and was ordained an Anglican priest in 1824. As time went on he began to have doubts about the validity of the Anglican Church’s position, and he explored other Christian traditions. In 1830, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church and went to Rome to study for the priesthood. In 1832, he returned to England as a priest and became a popular... Read more

A priest, author, and academic, Romano Guardini was one of the most important figures in 20th-century German Catholic intellectual life. Born in Verona, his family moved to Mainz when he was young, and he lived in Germany for the rest of his life. After studying chemistry and economics, he decided to study for the priesthood and was ordained in 1910. After ordination, he earned a doctorate in theology at the University of Freiburg. He also worked as a chaplain to... Read more

Therese Martin was born to Louis and Zelie Martin at Alençon, France on 2 January 1873. At age four she lost her mother, and the family moved to Lisieux. Taught by the Benedictine Nuns, she wished to embrace the Carmelite contemplative life as had her older sisters Pauline and Marie. In April 1888, at age fifteen, she entered the Carmel. In 1890, she made her religious profession. Thérèse grew in sanctity, inspired by the Gospel to place love at the... Read more

Born in 1877 in Galicia, he graduated from high school and served in the Austrian army before studying law at Lviv University. He then studied theology at the University of Innsbruck and was ordained a Ukrainian Catholic priest in 1905. After ordination he earned a doctorate in theology and became a seminary administrator at Lviv. In 1912, he was named a bishop. For the next sixteen years he served in Canada as Bishop for that country’s Ukrainian Catholics. In 1929... Read more

Jacques Fesch was the murderer of a French police officer, who became such a devout Roman Catholic while in prison awaiting execution that he has been proposed for canonization as a saint. The son of a wealthy banker, Jacques Fesch was an idler and abandoned religion as a teen. A playboy, he left his wife and their daughter, and fathered a child with another woman. He wanted to sail the Pacific, but his parents refused to pay for a boat.... Read more

The [early Church] Fathers made me a Catholic. John Henry Newman Read more

The above is from an 1855 book by Edward Beecher titled The Papal Conspiracy Exposed. The book had a popular following during the anti-Catholic wave of the 1850’s. Read more

On this day in 1881, Pope Leo XIII issued Grande Munus, on SS. Cyril & Methodius. In 1943 Pope Pius XII issued Divino Afflante Spiritu on Sacred Scripture. Wikipedia has the following to say about the latter: Divino Afflante Spiritu (Inspired by the Divine Spirit) inaugurated the modern period of Roman Catholic Bible studies by permitting the limited use of modern methods of biblical criticism. The Catholic bible scholar Raymond E. Brown described it as a ‘Magna Carta for biblical... Read more

Ludwig von Pastor (January 31, 1854, Aachen – September 30, 1928, Innsbruck), was the great Catholic historian of the Papacy, who published his Geschichte der Päpste seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters in sixteen volumes that appeared from 1886 to a last posthumous volume in 1933. It was translated into English and published as History of the Popes From the Close of the Middle Ages. He was born in Aachen and educated at Frankfurt. A pupil of Johannes Janssen at the... Read more

The above is a page from a Catechism written in the Sioux language. Read more