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I firmly believe that our salvation depends on the poor. Dorothy Day Read more

Jeanne Marie Rendu was born 9 September 1786 at Confort, a district of Gex in the Jura Mountains. She was the eldest of four girls. Her parents, simple living mountain people and small property owners, enjoyed a certain affluence and true respect throughout the area. Jeanne Marie was baptized the day she was born in the parish church of Lancrans. Her Godfather by proxy was Jacques Emery, a family friend and future Superior General of the Sulpicians in Paris. Jeanne... Read more

John Howard Griffin (June 16, 1920 – September 9, 1980) was an American journalist and author much of whose writing was about racial equality. A white man, he is best known for darkening his skin and journeying through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to experience segregation in the Deep South in 1959. He wrote about the experience in his 1961 book Black Like Me. Griffin was born in Dallas, Texas on July 16, 1920 to John Walter Griffin and Lena... Read more

Fredrick L. McGhee (October 28, 1861 – September 9, 1912), a black civil rights activist and one of America’s first African American lawyers. McGhee, born as a slave but who later was able to achieve a substantial career as an attorney and become one of the civil rights pioneers, was a contemporary of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. McGhee was born in Aberdeen, Mississippi, to Abraham McGhee and Sarah Walker, who were slaves. His father, from... Read more

This ad for St. Ignatius College (now the University of San Francisco) appeared in 1889. Read more

Atheism is a sign of mental strength, but only up to a certain point. Pascal Read more

On this day in various years, six encyclicals were issued. Pope Leo XIII issued three encyclicals on the rosary: Magnae Dei Matris (1892), Laetitiae Sanctae (1893), and Iucunda Semper Expectatione (1894). (Leo issued a total of eleven encyclicals on the rosary.) In 1899, he issued Depuis Le Jour, on the education of the clergy. In 1907, Pope St. Pius X condemned Modernism in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, and in 1928 Pope Pius XI issued Rerum Orentalium, which promoted oriental studies. Read more

Did you know that Europe’s Catholic monarchs once had the power to veto papal elections through the cardinals of their respective countries? The last time it happened was in the 1903 papal conclave (election) and today marks the death of the last cardinal to use the veto: Prince Jan Maurycy Paweł Puzyna de Kosielsko (13 September 1842 in Gwoździec, Galicia – 8 September 1911 in Kraków, Poland) was a Roman Catholic Cardinal who was auxiliary bishop of Lwów (now Lviv,... Read more

RAPPE, Louis Amadeus, R. C. bishop, born in Andrehem, France, 2 February, 1801; died in St. Alban’s, Vermont, 9 September, 1877. His parents were peasants, and up to his twentieth year he labored in the fields. Believing that he was called to the priesthood, he applied for admission to the college at Boulogne, and, after a classical course, entered the seminary of Arras, and was ordained a priest, 14 March, 1829. He was appointed pastor of Wisme, and subsequently chaplain... Read more